Well, there’s something noble—I guess—in
turning away from that next affair, especially when she’s married, and he’s
married to a beautiful, young, volcanic Irish woman, and he succumbed so many
times before anyway, unfaithfulness to those previous other wives a previous
mode of his being. The poem is a pretty flat description of a soiree’s
aftermath, sticking around and then: “The animal moment, when he sorted out her tail / in a rump session
with the vivid hostess.” Collective eye rolls here, I have to imagine, and it
doesn’t do much more for me than a trigger a half-mirthless chuckle. Whatever. A “rump session”? Really? Well, she said, apparently, “I’d like to have
your baby, but, she moaned, / I’m married.” Takes two to tango, no doubt about
it. Sounds like a pretty clear rump session offer to me.
He realizes he couldn’t have
forgiven himself nor atoned, so the man regretfully passes on the pass. Then he
writes a poem about it, and here I sit,
50 years later, thinking, you published
this? Can we get back to the Cold War, please? Racial injustice? Carnage in
Vietnam? Nuclear annihilation? Anything. Pull
your damn pants up for Chrissake.
“—I knew what I knew when I knew
when I was astray,” he admits. “all those bright painful years, forgiving all /
but when Henry & his wives came to blows.” Maybe you can teach an old dog
new tricks. Maybe the old goat learned something.
Henry’s blackface conscience
pipes up with a comment that he’s strong on morals these days, eh? “It’s good
to be faithful but it ain’t natural.” Evolutionary behaviorists aren’t quite
unanimous on this one, from what I gather. A friend remarked yesterday that
sexist jerks are a dime a dozen. We’re to admire it when he makes an effort to
grow up a bit? Like, thirty years too late? I am bored. And to think the last
third of my coffee got cold. But, Mr. Bones, you strikes me as intolerant. That’s
why god invented microwave ovens & such.
Heading back to the kitchen…
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