“Anatomy is destiny”
—Sigmund Freud

The fallacy behind this try at writ—
What matters is which way you’re genitalled—
Cohabits with the larger truth of it.
Consider, as a case of this, my eyes.
In the time it took my mother’s milky gaze
To register what more than once she called
Their beauty (milliseconds, one would guess)
My infant self was lastingly endowed
With an instance of the ultimate largesse:
A love that proved conducive, as the parent’s
Love it was, to a life that I, on balance,
Would have to call a blessing to have had.

          —Dan Brown

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Dan Brown’s Subjects in Poetry is forthcoming this November from lsu Press.



This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 40 Number 2, on page 31
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