yen sent me this william matthews poem. i am not sure - it - helps - but it is a way - of thinking

The Theme of the Three Caskets



'Men and women are two locked caskets,
each of which contains the key to the other.'
                                - Isak Dinesen



One gold, one silver, one lead: who thinks
this test easy has already flunked.


Or, you have three daughters, two humming-
birds and the youngest, Cordelia, a grackle.


And here's Cinderella, the ash-princess.
Three guesses, three wishes, three strikes and 


you're out. You've been practicing for this 
for years, jumping rope, counting out,


learning to waltz, games and puzzles,
tests and chores. And work, in which strain


and ease fill and drain the body like air
having its way with the lungs. And now?


Your palms are mossy with sweat.
The more you think the less you understand.


It's only your life you must choose, daily.



Freud, father of psychoanalysis,
the study of self-deception and survival,
saw the wish-fulfillment in this theme:


that we can choose death and make what we can't
refuse a trophy to self-knowledge, grey,
malleable, dense with low tensile strength


and poisonous in every compound.
And that a vote for death elects love.
If death is the mother of love (Freud wrote


more, and more lovingly, on mothers
than on fathers), she is also the mother
of envy and gossip and spite, and she


loves her children equally. It isn't mom
who folds us finally in her arms,
and it is we who are elected.



Is love the reward, or the test itself?


That kind of thought speeds our swift lives
along. The August air is stale in


the slack leaves, and a new moon thin
as a fingernail-paring tilts orange


and low in the rusty sky, and the city 
is thick with trysts and spats,


and the banked blue fires of TV sets,
and the anger and depression that bead


on the body like an acid dew when it's hot.
Tonight it seems that love is what's


missing, the better half. But think 
with your body: not to be dead is to be


sexual, vivid, tender and harsh, a riot
of mixed feelings, and able to choose.