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Not even the males and the men of the males make use of their pinched tongues to sing, not even the females and the women of the females, corollas stemmed to spray on end sing their ruddy stones The males and the men of the males feel the sea the ranch and the wheat, rice ears polyglottal weddings unseasonable lips one body to the next Indigenes displaced by indigenes displaced wherein the ranchlands, then the fields of wheat, burn to the crust The choice between taking the flowers-of-the-trees- to-blossom and the long-as-the-rocks always lands on the flowers-of-the-trees- to blossom— bouquet thrown hurriedly into the sun

September was when it began. Locusts dying in the fields; our dogs Silent, moving like shadows on a wall; And strange worms crawling; flies of a kind We had never seen before; huge vineyard moths; Badgers and snakes, abandoning Their holes in the field; the fruit gone rotten; Queer fungi sprouting; the fields and woods Covered with spiderwebs; black vapors Rising from the earth - all these, And more began that fall. Ravens flew round The hospital in pairs. Where there was water, We could hear the sound of beating clothes All through the night. We could not count All the miscarriages, the quarrels, the jealousies. And one day in a field I saw A swarm of frogs, swollen and hideous, Hundreds upon hundreds, sitting on each other, Huddled together, silent, ominous, And heard the sound of rushing wind.

II.iv I am writing this poem about the 1965 massacre of Indonesians by Indonesians which in an article ten years later I could not publish except in Nottingham England with a friend Malcolm Caldwell who has since himself been murdered no one will say by whom but I will guess seeing as this is precisely poetry the CIA's and now Peking's Cambodian assassins the Khmer Serai In that article I estimated a half-million or more killed in this period it took Noam in a book suppressed by its first publisher to quote Admiral Sudomo of the Indonesian junta more than 500,000 and now Amnesty International many more than one million so much for my balanced prose But none of us experienced that pervasive smell of death those impassable rivers clogged with corpses Robert Lowell is that why even you a pacifist had so little to say about it? Or you gentle reader let us examine carefully the good reasons you and I don't enjoy reading this Like the time in the steep Engadine we saw the silent avalanche fall away from the mountain hair and eyebrows the first to feel the murmurations of the spreading killer wind IV.i Mégève   coming down beside a rainbow into a shower glissade 1000 meters on wet grass laughter at falling safe think   married a Venezuelan and lives near Lausanne tell me now you with homes in the mountains who are at hand and know all things where we hear only rumor of the captains at Bilderberg meetings one has to sound like a John Bircher to talk about between the Rockefellers the Agnellis and the Rothschilds at whose Megeve resort we were lodged in uncomfrtable luxury as delegates to the International Student Service Bilderberg meetings supplying Prince Bernhard with an almost unrivalled network not just for the European Movement financed with German counterpart funds but also for the recruitment of old intelligence contacts as conduits for Lockheed payoffs through the Temperate Zone Research Foundation for Antelope Cobbler the Italian premier which supplimented the CIA's financial support to parties canidates and incumbent leaders of almost every political persuasion and under Sukarno which is why I am telling all this -- not just recalling the swampy fields around the Rockefeller lodge in the Connecticut valley where the Liberty Lobby discovered the Bilderbergers in '67 -- Jakarta payments deflected four months before the coup at legal risks to Lockheed towards the very wealthy General Alamsjah epitome of the military entrepreneur whom a Lockheed memo called the second man the coup made at once funds available to Suharto a Lockheed web extending from Geneva to Jakarta millions to Japanese officials where every move made was approved by Washington the money through Deak back to Shig Katayama in the Cayman Islands the Wildlife Fund the Sultan Castle Bank in the Bahamas Helliwell narcotics CIA the name Richard M. Nixon on the list It was at a Bilderberg meeting that Prince Bernhard was introduced by Baron Edmond de Rothschild to Tibor Rosenbaum of the ICB the International Credit Bank (later exposed by the Baron after the Vesco coup as a source of secret funds for the Mossad Israel's intelligence service and one of the country's primary weapons brokers) and whose colleague Ed Levinson was the power behind the Havana Riviera and the Serv-U Corporation of the Bobby Baker payoffs which began to be exposed in November 1963 -- My book would have asked as the Warren Commission staff working for Allen Dulles was unable to why Levinson's pit-boss McWillie gambler and murderer from the old Binion gang in Dallas and Fort Worth who had a fix with Mr. Big I don't think we'd better go into that phase of it twice brought to Havana most likely as a courier his close friend Jack Ruby A dumb subject The book went into galleys and was photographed for the Pocket Books spring catalogue but never published freeing me to write this poem Do you remember   yes just for an instant the sun warm on our shoulders and beyond the mists rising from the meadow Mont Blanc IV.ii From the Bay Bridge on the way home from the opera you could look down on the searchlights of the Oakland Army Terminal where they loaded the containers of pellet-bombs and napalm into black Japanese ships over which the cranes bent like anxious surgeons in the calm and glassy night People of good will of whom at first there were many were willing to sign petitions or to help in drafting the letter to the Times about how six months they had moved from true to false reports of the North Vietnamese negotiating position that the letter never published and the music changing bonfires to still the streets the first smudges of tear gas the Yellow Submarine (acid in Bir Sur Allen kneeling to pray for Johnson's health) at the rock poetry festival no sensations from my first joint except for the difference between the salt and pepper I felt being shaken on my bare left arm Owsley by parachute at the Human Be-in Mika on Carole's shoulders one mine so they could see the Brave New World worms in the rose the party's hostess some new drug in the basement crying like a child CIA personnel helping local chemists set up LCD labs in the Bay Area to monitor events STP Serenity from Dow Chemical and the Edgewood Arsenal like being shot out of a gun men with their Sunday morning rifle range target practice Black Panthers Ku Klux Klan women who shyly hinted at ineffable orgies of acid nakedness Ed Sanders the Fugs investigative poetics Out demons out with no respect whatsoever for the unassailable logic of the next step two hundred pounds of daisies from Peggy Hitchcock to skybomb the Pentagon Fort Funston Beach the Barb's first nude-in under the fixed gaze of the mounted police dunes of iceplants and callas linnets in the sun and mist (To shoot a policeman is a sacred act) the women in seaweed and surf wading as if to be washed as clean as seals IV.viii Clifford Geertz having just reread your Notes on the Balinese cockfight how you were first accepted by cautious villagers after you all fled from the Javanese constabulary and how slaughter in the cock ring itself after red pepper is stuffed down their beaks and up their anuses joins pride to selfhood selfhood to cocks and cocks to destruction a blood sacrifice offered to the demons to pacify their cannibal hunger depicting how things are among men not literally but almost worse imaginatively what it says is it is of these emotions that society is built and of the combat between terrible witch Rangda her eyes bulging like boils and the endearing monster Barong a clash between the malignant and the ridiculous It is not your belief in men every last one of them are cultural artifacts that I now question or even that the imposition of meaning on life is the major end of human existence that Virgilian flourish in your footnote to Max Weber but your recurring interpretations of the Balinese massacre after what you choose to call the bungled coup and its savage aftermath My complaint is not of your early field project for Ford and the CIA-funded Center at MIT in which you preceded Pauker or your commissioned study on which local elites would best play a role in Rostow's pre-take-off period I will not cast that stone from this front window of the world's largest weapons lab you who know about puputan and Tjalonarang have the right to recall the fact of the massacre through the medium of the cockfight the theatricality of trance but why did you write several hundred thousand people were massacred largely villagers by other villagers though there were some army executions as well when even Shaplen admits the murders in Bali did not start until early December that is until after Colonel Edhie's commandos with unit-names like Dracula had finished in East Java the army began it then handed the job over to the Balinese that is to the special teams set up under Nasution's and Suharto's orders and finally stopped the bloodletting as the smell of burning houses overpowered the customary fragrance of the rich island flora Clifford Geertz sometimes the world is not as mysterious as you and I might wish why can you not write as straightforwardly as Time about the land to which you returned on a junta visa and how can you write about the integrative revolution in a book that is indexed to sixty-one countries Paraguay the Soviet Union but not the United States? IV.ix When some toys from the West where stolen out of the back seat of our Peugeot in Saska Kepa I went without thinking to the Warsaw police A moustached officer wrote down everything I had to say which was very little and then asked me Was the door locked? I said I had no idea probably not and he said Prosze Pana excuse me but it would be good in the future to keep your doors locked Our children are not used to seeing toys from the west and you do not want to encourage them in crime those Sunday walks with Cassie in her blue pram the well-dressed housewives offering in illegal dollars twice what we paid for it I told the officer I was withdrawing my complaint He smiled and began to talk about his life as a policeman how much easier it had been after Stalin had died in those days no one wanted to talk to us even our own children sometimes mistrusting us despite what they learned at school We talked for two hours and I think of him often as I read in the papers of Solidarnosc suppressed how those must be privileged moments one can so transcend history how today he would not dare to have such a conversation nor I have the heart And yet those two hours in that ill-furnished precinct seem somehow more true than the street battles since My own life is easier no longer having to be consul I suspect that on our side officials of U.S. Steel IV.xvii And now East Timor where in 1977 the Indonesian minister admits perhaps 80,000 might have been killed that is to say one person out of eight by his own government's paracommandos these gentle midnight faces the beetles which crowd their eyes From 1975 to 1977 the New York Times index entries for East Timor dropped from six columns to five lines

One will live to see the Caterpillar rut everything they walk on—seacliff buckwheat cleared, relentless ice plant to replace it, the wild fields bisected by the scenic highway, canyons covered with cul-de-sacs, gas stations, comfortable homes, the whole habitat along this coastal stretch endangered, everything, everyone, everywhere in it danger as well— but now they're logging the one stilling hawk Smith sights, the conspiring grasses' shh shhhh ssh, the coreopsis Mattoni's boot barely spares, and, netted, a solitary blue butterfly. Smith ahead of him chasing the stream, Mattoni wonders if he plans to swim again. Just like that the spell breaks. It's years later, Mattoni lecturing on his struggling butterfly. How fragile. • If his daughter spooled out the fabric she's chosen for her wedding gown, raw taffeta, burled, a bright hued tan, perhaps Mattoni would remember how those dunes looked from a distance, the fabric, balanced between her arms, making valleys in the valley, the fan above her mimicking the breeze. He and his friend loved everything softly undulating under the coyest wind, and the rough truth as they walked through the land's scratch and scrabble and no one was there, then, besides Mattoni and his friend, walking along Dolan's Creek, in that part of California they hated to share. The ocean, a mile or so off, anything but passive so that even there, in the canyon, they sometimes heard it smack and pull well-braced rocks. The breeze, basic: salty, bitter, sour, sweet. Smith trying to identify the scent, tearing leaves of manzanita, yelling: "This is it. Here! This is it!" his hand to his nose, his eyes, having finally seen the source of his pleasure, alive. • In the lab, after the accident, he remembered it, the butterfly. How good a swimmer Smith had been, how rough the currents there at Half Moon Bay, his friend alone with reel and rod—Mattoni back at school early that year, his summer finished too soon— then all of them together in the sneaker wave, and before that the ridge, congregations of pinking blossoms, and one of them bowing, scaring up the living, the frail and flighty beast too beautiful to never be pinned, those nights Mattoni worked without his friend, he remembered too. He called the butterfly Smith's Blue.

I’m talking to you old man. Listen to me as you step inside this garden to fill a breakfast bowl with blueberries ripened on the bushes I’m planting now, twenty years back from where you’re standing. It’s strictly a long-term project—first year pull off the blossoms before they open, second year let them flower, watch the bees bobbing in every bonnet, but don’t touch the fruit till year three, and then only sample a handful or two . . . Old man I’m doing this for you! You know what they say about blueberries: blood-cleansing, mood-lifting memory-boosters; every bush a little fountain of youth sparkling with flavonoids, anthocyanin . . . I’ve spent all summer clearing brush sawing locust poles for the frames, digging in mounds of pine needles, bales of peat moss— I thought I’d do it while I still could. You can do something for me in turn: think about the things an old man should; things I’ve shied away from, last things. Care about them only don’t care too (you’ll know better than I do what I mean or what I couldn’t say, but meant). Reconcile, forgive, repent, but don’t go soft on me; keep the faith, our infidels’ implicit vow: “not the hereafter but the here and now  . . . ” Weigh your heart against the feather of truth as the Egyptians did, and purge its sin, but for your own sake, not your soul’s. And since the only certain eternity’s the one that stretches backward, look for it here inside this garden: Blueray, Bluecrop, Bluetta, Hardy Blue; little fat droplets of transubstantiate sky, each in its yeast-misted wineskin, chilled in dew. This was your labor, these are the fruits thereof. Fill up your bowl old man and bring them in.

My mother's voice is at my throat —"Try a scarf in the neckline"— and on my lips: "Just a little lipstick." Today I'm wearing both. My "mother's voice," pitched high, carries reprimand and care: "No boom on the table!" My daughter swats me as I carry her away from the dearest activity on earth—sticks, stones, struck as if the coffee table were a flint. "Barbarian," I croon in heels. "What's that?" she asks and rips a nylon with a fingernail. She cries at the turtleneck pulled over her head. "I'll give you something to cry about!" I hush, succeeding for another day, or an hour—another minute late for work. Tonight I'll choose a lullaby: "Bluebird at my window," Mother sang to me, a voice that could broom sorrow through the door . . . A decal staggered on the painted bureau, blue wing seeking, finding no way out.

She kept its bones in a glass case next to the recliner in the living room, and sometimes thought she heard him mewing, like a faint background music; but if she stopped to listen, it disappeared. Likewise with a nuzzling around her calves, she’d reach absent-mindedly to scratch him, but her fingers found nothing but air. One day, in the corner of her eye, slinking by the sofa, there was a shadow. She glanced over, expecting it to vanish. But this time it remained. She looked at it full on. She watched it move. Low and angular, not quite as catlike as one might suppose, but still, it was him. She walked to the door, just like in the old days, and opened it, and met a whoosh of winter air. She waited. The bones in the glass case rattled. Then the cat-shadow darted at her, through her legs, and slipped outside. It mingled with the shadows of bare branches, and leapt at the shadow of a bird. She looked at the tree, but there was no bird. Then he blended into the shadow of a bush. She stood in the threshold, her hands on the door, the sharp breeze ruffling the faded flowers of her house dress, and she could feel her own bones rattling in her body, her own shadow trying to slip out.

i. Not to go backward, not to watch the women peddling in reverse past the church, the priest in his black habit receding from the chapel door. Not to go backward, the bones of August becoming the bones of March, branch of dogwood picked clean by frost. Not to say Yes when asked the question all women wait to hear, Are you anything like your mother?

Under fluorescent light, aligned on a bench and table top, oranges the size of marbles dangle from trees with glossy leaves. White trumpets bloom in tiny clay pots. Under a firethorn’s twisted limbs, a three inch monk holds a cup from which he appears to drink the interior life. The potter prizes his bonsai children who will never grow up, never leave home.

I lost my book. It’s got the names in it. Names for things and goods; structures, Types, boundaries, procedures, goads. My girl is in it, she who carried it Within her like a rare worm Until the untended bird came And tore its leaves from her As she lay there, Pencil pressing page, Taking it all down. Then the vast storehouses came down too, And the small secret ones, The shelves and grappling hooks, Dust, ink, lead, linen, ragged board. It’s time to go home and wash up. Home was in the book in my possession When I was reading what had been put down In her hand and mine, Instructions, inventories, Names. But I can’t read this while looking at words While I am assigned to living In what is called a home. It is all unkept. Its yard has turned back to heat-giving Snail-like deposits drowning in daylight By the mossed-over fence post. We lived here once? We took words down for all the names, Made markings? That book is lost, reader, Not misplaced.