David Gewanter

Poets' Anti-War Rally, 12 Feb. 2003 The massed and pillared wings of the White House never fly— whitewashed yearly, they stand impervious to metaphor, to hawk and dove, and red armies of ants. Only the halting squirrels investigate, creeping past the arrowhead gates to scratch the Midas lawns for treasure—On the street, commentators wander like boys in a story too simple to explain. The political message, a hat punched inside out: once, the Nazis got word that Churchill would visit Roosevelt "in Casa Blanca": U-Boats bobbed near the Potomac, waiting for him... but Churchill, as he said, was sailing to Morocco. Reagan protesters splashed the Pentagon walls daily with cow blood— soldiers waxed the plaster, and triremes of rats licked the bloody grass; the EPA sent health goons to stomp them, and the pacifists, away— Then rats stormed the National Zoo: urbane, patient inheritors of the earth, they snapped prairie dogs like wishbones; vigilante zookeepers laced the ground with poison, Carthage delenda est, and killed the hippo. (Here, in the New World Order, penguin and polar bear soak up ozone, and Nation shall beat them both into ploughshares....) Hawks and fat cats disdained the White House squirrels, their proconsul Chevy Suburban nosed us aside: we spoke against the war, and for the cameras, spelled our names on Chinese Radio—Elder poets shrewdly loitered at the lobbiest bar, read first, then left us to the falange of Secret Servicemen, chatting like critics into their black lapels at every bungled line: this was no singing school, no falcon heard our crows and warbles... Emily, our modest leader, rapped the gate: "Mrs. Bush wanted American poems— I brought 3,000, all against the war. Can you take them?" Gulping, the pimply guard asked his shirt for help; older hands hustled up, "The Great Oz cannot see you..." etc. Will four and twenty blackbirds fill a cowboy hat? Bunkered belowdecks, the President goes for the burn, racing the cut tongue of his treadmill to a dead heat. Even Nixon met the enemy once, strode with his staff into a red sea of hippies— they didn't part, and he burbled about baseball... from his desk, he liked to watch the sightseers through a gap in the hedges; peaceniks learned this and blocked his view, stood there day and night for years: Nixon, nightmare reality shanking through his eyes, knelt with Kissinger: Henry, he moaned,what do they want?.... Days from now, how many days, the Valentine "Woo at the Zoo" begins. A hand-raised falcon bows, and shares meat with its master.... He bows in turn, and eats; both softly whisper ee-chu, ee-chu,

for R.G. As if sliding down the green, scuffed face of the wave, a seaplane falls and turns together, keeping the waters of the ear flat: a dead calm. But when the window’s frowning strip of shoreline, the battalions of tropical-drinks umbrellas guarding the sandcastles and saltboxes of the rich, when these flip upside down, and the pale clouded sky floats below the ocean, then we jolt awake— But this is not her dream, not water or land. Tell me again, what illness do I think I have? The ropes of blood coil through her neck, they twist as it twists, as the head looks for parents and young men, for nurses, strangers, year upon year attending until the pulpy blood knots up at last, and the warrens of the brain dry and crackle, a town of names she saunters one long night: streets without signs lead to a girlhood park, to songs under stars, and lipstick, old houses forever unbuilding themselves—but within the blue jungle scaffolding, a gallery of faces stares back at her, portraits she can’t place . . . and then the town flattens and crumbles behind her, it grows to dry scrabbled pasture under a dishplate moon, hanging there in the tints of the sky, yet like a stopped clock, right twice a day: Now ma’am, can you remember the name of the President who was shot in the ‘60s? —Lincoln? And if the names had sunk beneath the sea, rolling hump and hollow, leopard spotted foam—surgeons would haul up the big sharks and club them silly, knife off a fin, then drop them bleeding onto the docks of Alcatraz, warning the inmates: “See that? No inside fin, they’ll  swim round this Rock forever. . . .” The convicts build the prison, then move inside, their block minds ignite a thousand homes by dawn, then melt in the butter sun of breakfast porridge. . . . But this is not the Philosopher’s circle prison, no lidless Eye radiates from the center, beneficent and watchful: the neutered grounds here at the Residence for Life are groomed like the campus of Depression State U: past the dwarfish berms and drumlins a mazy cobalt walkway slithers to the storage lake, with its hooded fount of aqua vitae sudsing the green larvae, its dry Gazebo Isle no one shuffles to . . . One night, the distraught Residence cook shoots himself dead: everyone mourns, but only the young staff seek counseling, their threshold of death not yet raised to that of teetering Mr. On-His-Toes, of Ms. Wheelchair-With-Political-Bumper-Stickers, or elegant Mrs. Whisper, polite confused survivors of wiped-out families, trolley cars, jobs learned and lost, a cosmos squeezed beneath the blood boulder— Why can’t I remember my problem? They do not scream. They who once made things happen now watch things happen to them: they hand their middle chapters to their children, and quietly appraise the spindle of a leafless sapling outside, staked to three larger poles of wood: all of them under arrest. And you must calm yourself. In the acrid hold of their boat, whose strangely knotted sail whips the wind round on each side, anchorless boat that hugs the dock, and keeps the dock from drifting to sea, you can hear the first, reeling chapters, of pierside painters crowding a rustic barrel-and-shanty scene so clichéd the locals called it “Port Motif Number One”—: the washy dab and smear of the medical test, Can you tell me what day this is? —You mean now? The brush like an oar rinses off its paints; a filmy rainbow upon the waters, coils and ribbons you trace in your own sweet time.

But to whatever animal we ascribe these remains, it is certain such a one has existed in America, and that it has been the largest of all terrestrial beings. It should have sufficed to have rescued the earth it inhabited, and the atmosphere it breathed, from the imputation of impotence. . . . —Thomas Jefferson,Notes on the State of Virginia I called for armour, rose, and did not reel. But when I thought . . . I could feel My wound open wide. —Thom Gunn, “The Wound” THE STATES For he can creep. Whose doctor said his bipolar was pre-existing. Smacked in the head by a steel cargo door, hinges tied with a hamburger bag. The day he blew up: a sucking silence, mouth of tar, story told over and over. bump and rattle, caissons rolling. The blacked-out school bus window is scratched to read GHOST RECON. Street signs flash by, “This here is Georgia. Now I see New Hampshire, and here’s Colorado.”What country is this city? Gorked on pain-relief cocktails, Iraq to Landstuhl Med to Andrews Air Force, wheelchair bus to Walter Reed. Wounded when burning poppies, now afloat on morphine. “As a state,” he once emailed, “Afghanistan is next to Mars.” The navigator slides along a wall: “Sir, can you show me north?” Where the gazebo is a tank. Where the manhole covers a bomb. Who apologize for shaving cuts. Skull plate, 40-lb. gain from meds, big ox baby. “Fall in,” the heart-attack sergeant tells the legless man. “At ease,” he tells the psychotics. They limp by drug dealers for their scoop of Baskin-Robbins. Are told, “Suck it up, get used to the outside world.” Who are saved, but die in dreams, salute with a mechanical arm. CONSTITUTION AVE, CAPITALSAURUS DAY Beneath the marble, beneath the paper laws; the paved boglands and legs-up taverns, the slave-built steps of the Capitol. Winter 1898, a sewer-man digs up a dinosaur spine, a nomen nudum, naked & unnamed fossil tombed later at the Smithsonian near Jefferson’s Mammoth tooth that rattled his pocket, cherished knuckle-bone and proof against the French naturalist who with powdered hands wrote that New World dampness and cold had stunted flora, animals, and Man: the American Degeneracy. Jefferson ordered Lewis & Clark to find a living Mammoth, the “animal de l’Ohio” grazing somewhere west of Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, and— lest a species wither, or Nation grow small— brought Mammoth bones to Monticello. “WHEREAS, the remains of a large carnivorous dinosaur, which may be an ancestor of the Tyrannosaurus rex, were found at First and ‘F’ Streets, SE, NOW, THEREFORE, I, MAYOR OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, do hereby proclaim January 28, 2001, as ‘CAPITALSAURUS DAY.’” Anthony A. Williams DISCOVERY IN SIBERIA Reindeer of the herdsman Jarkov nuzzle a tusk frozen 20,000 years. Soon, French naturalists arrive. Radar shows the Holy Grail of Mammoth hunters, a frigid bulk, twice an elephant’s size— Timber saws cut the block. Hoisted by military helicopter to Stalin’s gulag caves, frozen labs for scientist-prisoners, now re-opened. Waving hair-dryers to sublimate the ice, so that Discovery can film them planting clone eggs inside an elephant, hatching a Mammoth American defender to split the ramparts, show scheduled for release in 2001 —the year, in the sci-fi film, the monkeys learn to talk; when Mayor Williams greets the Capitalsaurus and the new President Bush; when Mohammed Atta decides he cannot date a waitress. SECURITAS Weary headlands roll through zones of night, red lights flash the muted streets, crotch-of-moss draining a blue spark dawn— We sleep, staring. Tree-shapes and stars prod us, the belt of Orion is a martyr’s bomb. And the king, our godsbody, lies abed groaning, chill spirit belaboring the flesh— His spit and sperm are tallied; his temperature, a weather report told by doctors. Until lady Securitas peers from a cloud— her bloodlined hands, the blank, bureaucratic face! We pray with our bodies: cold sweat, a hymn of twitches, heart racing, shrieking dreams . . . But fragrant Securitas has only come for him— To compass him about. Lifting out her breast. Stoppers his mouth with a thick nipple. Squeezing till the ichor throbs from his eyes, milk to make us thirsty— IRAQ & TEXAS: DJINN ROADS Helicopters park at Forward Base EXXON ; only the sand is flying today, and it breaks the speed limits, 50 miles an hour. Visibility zero; the air is hot as blood, the sky is burnt amber. Lord keep still our hands. In Texas, teens patrol the roads by night, burning the body’s fuel—State Troopers pull them over. George, fishtailing dauphin, a graceful falldown drunk, clouds the breathalyzer: FELONY DUI. Daddy’s name sinks the report— Election night, heaven staring, and Laura’s yellowcake Chevy mows down her boyfriend: VEHICULAR HOMICIDE: the car found guilty. “I know this as an adult, it was crushing,” she recalls. Her scented, unmarked body sweats beneath foundation garments and paste. His unmarked body, and fructifying breath, his stone squint chasing snakes from the sun— They walk, O my darling, the hill of light; the bite of remorse teaches them to bite. Then it rains. What falls from the sky is not water but mud, raindrops pulling clouds of sand into large wet globs. “It was biblical,” says Col. Gibbs. Lights a cigarette, his back to the storm: “You’ve got to embrace the suck.” HOTEL AFTERMATH From the dust, the limbs jerk up alive, stagger home to camp. Martian: neck gators for the nose, goggles seal off the eyes, baby wipes. WHAT DID YOU FIND THERE? A slipper, an ear, some wire. A chemical suit. A map of water. —— From Stalin’s cave, just bits of gristle—unreadable, no Frankenstein DNA. They rewrite the Mammoth show. From Walter Reed, “an aggressive campaign to deal with the mice infestation.” Recovery rooms, “spit-polish clean.” Whose mother swallows all the soldier medicine. Who wheels himself in to play Texas Hold ‘Em. Whose father says, “It was OK for my son to give his body. They try in their power, but it reverses itself.” Jefferson’s American Incognito is ground up for fertilizer— the maid said it was cow bones. Sweet heartland, Governor Meriwether Lewis of Louisiana, depression pre-existing, shoots himself in the chest and head. Who sit by the apples and wingback chairs. “If I had two hands, I’d order two vodkas”— Who cannot count his change. Who wake up and punch the air.