War Bird: A Journal

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,