However, Frederick Seidel himself has insisted “Everything in the
poems is true…you should take them at face value.”
OEDIPAL STRIVINGS
By Frederick Seidel
A dinosaur egg opens in a lab
And out steps my paternal grandfather, Sam,
Already taller than a man,
And on his way to becoming a stomping mile-high predator, so I ran.
I never knew my mother’s father, who may have been a suicide.
He was buried in a pauper’s grave my mother tried
To find, without success. Jews grab
The thing they love unless it’s ham,
And hold it tightly to them lest it die—
60
Le portrait magazine