The Salt Stronger

I have seen the legislators on their way, the jacketless men in mid-winter who will cast their votes like stones for this war. Men who have to cross the street through slush and over gutter, their cuffs now vaguely blued with a salt that dries in dots where it splashes, and mingles with the finely woven cloth of the chalk-stripe suits, the soi-disant practical men, you can see them now tiptoeing, now leaping, balletic, windsor-knotted, fragrant and shaved, they pass, they pass the window of the Capitol Deli wherein I am writing to my friend in Baghdad, he a “witness for peace,” a poet who for years has wondered what good poetry is or has been or does. I compose today’s answer from here, saying, I think of poetry as a salt dug from a foreign mine