By Gerald Stern
Not infrequently destroyed as bits of paper
of no value by the women in my family,
namely Ida, Libby, and the maid Thelma,
my drawings were gone by the time I was eleven
and so I turned to music and led orchestras
walking through the woods, and Saturday nights
we feasted on macaroni, tomato soup and falso
cheese cooked at three hundred fifty degrees
which I called spaghetti until I was 21
and loved our nights there, Thelma, Libby, and Ida,
fat as I was then, fat and near-sighted
and given over to art, such as I saw it,
and loved by the three of them and smothered somewhat,
and it would be five years of breaking loose,
reading Kropotkin first, then reading Keats,
and standing on my head and singing by which
I developed the longing though I never
turned against that spaghetti, I was always
loyal to one thing, you could almost measure
my stubbornness and my wildness by loyalty.