Dispatch #6

Roll Call

I SLICED UP Ezra Pound this morning, one of the Cantos, then I stapled him to Allen Ginsberg, an excerpt from his Kaddish. Ruth Stone was on his other side, followed by Muriel Rukeyser talking about Oedipus and what he couldn’t see. Then George Oppen and Gwendolyn Brooks and finally Stanley Kunitz, recalling at sixty-four how his mother slapped him when he retrieved, from the attic, the portrait of his father, a man she never forgave for committing suicide when she was pregnant with their son, the one who grew up to write poems.


The Portrait

My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave moustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.

—Stanley Kunitz