Sharon Olds "I Go Back to May 1937"

This poem is great. Somethings I enjoy about it: 1. It is a lot more clear than a lot of the poetry we have read in class, yet it is extremely interesting nonetheless. 2. The poem has a narrative that includes setting, time, weather, characters, and a narrator. 3. The poem contains, at least the way I read it, a really weird, frightening, but ultimately reassuring idea behind it. If anyone has seen Sean Penn directed film "Into the Wild," I think you will recognize that this poem is read by the main character early on in the movie. In that movie, the images in the poem are shown on the screen as the poem is read in the background: "red tiles glinting like bent/plates of blood behind his head" (I love that line by the way), "the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its/sword tips aglow in the May air;" maybe it's cheating, but seeing the images of the poem shown on screen in the movie really allows me to visualize this poem. The poem works with characters, a girl and a guy eventually to be husband and wife and mom and dad. The narrator is there kid, warning them about the "things/you cannot imagine you would ever do,/you are going to do bad things to children,/you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,/you are going to want to die." This is a very strong warning from their kid. He or she is seeming to say that the guy and the girl in the story has hurt them, that they have dome something, be it divorce, abuse, whatever, that makes this kid question if he even wanted his parents to meet in the first place. This poem is different from a lot of the work we have read this year based on the work it does on a narrative that invites a lot of speculation and questions. The idea I mentioned earlier that, for some reason, I attach to this poem is the idea of me, and everybody else in this world, being born. Are we only born because, over the history of mankind, random men and women met at random times and places and ended up having a kid, and this kid met someone of the opposite sex and produced another one of my ancestors (I know, confusing and weird)? But, more simply put, are we only who we are because of who each and every one of our ancestors met and reproduced with over the history of man until it led to our parents? The speaker in this poem says he doesn't stop them from marrying: "but I don't do it. I want to live." For some reason that line makes me think of that very, absurd digression I just went on. I'm not crazy, am I?
*Mike McCune