Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I am David Kern.

Today's poem is by Mary Jo Salter, an American poet born in 1954. She is a co-editor of the

Norton Anthology of Poetry and a professor in the writing seminars program

at Johns Hopkins University. I know a number of poets and scholars and journal editors and people

like that who are big fans of her work. And unfortunately, I am not, I'm not terribly familiar

with her work. I know a few poems, but I have decided that she's

somebody that I want to get to know a little bit better because of how much people that I trust like

her. And the poem that I'm going to read today is called Half a Double Sonnet, and it says that it is

for Ben. I'm actually getting this out of the making of a poem on Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms,

which is edited by Mark Strand and Avon Boland.

This is how it goes.

Their ordeal over, now the only trouble was conveying somehow to a boy of three that for a week

or two he'd be seeing double. Surely he wouldn't recall the surgery years later, but what

about the psychic scars? And so when the patch came off, they bought the toy he'd wanted most.

He held it high. Two cars, he cried, and drove himself from joy to joy.

Two baby sisters. One was enough of Claire, but who could complain, considering that another woman

had stepped forward to take care of the girls, which left them all alone with mother. Victory.

Even when he went to pee, he was seconded in his virility.

So half a double sonnet, great title for a poem about, you know, seeing double. There's just numbers all throughout this poem,

which is great for a sonnet, of course.

And that makes it kind of a lot of fun to study,

a lot of fun to play around with, imitate, things like that.

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