For Louise Glück
My friend, a poet, a mother loves her good son
I never met—I know nothing about him
except he’s a sommelier in San Francisco,
a priest of unsanctified wine. I believe
he has the right to celebrate any religion or none.
I believe in celebration, the ceremonious:
Jesus gave thanks for what he received
at the last supper—the Virgin was not invited.
Jesus ate bitter herbs, spilled some wine
for each plague, not to drink a full glass
of his enemy’s suffering. Surely Jesus was proud
of the Haggadah’s anti-slavery passages,
still he allowed his disciples their slaves—
“a fault of the times”—John Adams,
our second President, did not have or share.
He told his boy John Quincy, “You will never be alone,
always carry a book of poems with you.”
Sommelier, be proud six hundred years before
the birth of Jesus, the Babylonian Talmud
gave reasons for capital punishment—
then warned the chosen people: “any court that gives
the sentence more than once in 70 years will be
known as the Court of the Assassins.”
Dear poet’s son, you grew up in a house
where poetry was the national sport and pastime.
Words thrown across the plate of poetry,
fast balls, screw-balls, sliders, balls and strikes,
umpires cried safe! or out!
Your mother, a beauty, taught you hide-and-seek,
a game played by flowers, animals, everything that lives.
Planets and stars seem to know the game.
(There is hiding and seeking in this writing.)
You will never meet someone who does not know
something you do not know.
Leopardi was not allowed to cut
his own meat till he was twenty-five
or leave the house in the Marches without a tutor.
Feral mothers, long as they live, tell their sons
when it is bedtime, with whom to make love,
man or woman, younger or older,
like or opposite mama or father
who may have a second wife living in Boston.
There’s an ancient game, Rivals,
some call Fate, played between fathers and mothers
for sons' or daughters' love. Rivals was played to the death,
when poems were written on turtle shells, chiseled on stone,
since there were breasts and lullabies... mothers always win,
unless they die young. Priapic fathers love
their children, protect them from theives.
Tear out all the pages from the holy texts,
what’s left—mothers always win.
What does the woman want?
A glass of Château Pavie Cheval Blanc.
Years ago, sommelier Noah's mother told him,
“You once lived inside me.
Honey, you are pretender to my throne,
my Prince of Wales.” She gave him a harp
he hung among the willows.
In bed she kissed him and said, “Little white whale,
if you get lost, mother will always hear you
a hundred miles away.”