505 History and politics poems

(‘“The Finest Story in the World”’ —Many Inventions ) We pulled for you when the wind was against us and the sails were low. Will you never let us go? We ate bread and onions when you took towns, or ran aboard quickly when you were beaten back by the foe. The Captains walked up and down the deck in fair weather singing songs, but we were below. We fainted with our chins on the oars and you did not see that we were idle, for we still swung to and fro. Will you never let us go? The salt made the oar-handles like shark-skin; our knees were cut to the bone with salt-cracks; our hair was stuck to our foreheads; and our lips were cut to the gums, and you whipped us because we could not row. Will you never let us go? But, in a little time, we shall run out of the port-holes as the water runs along the oar-blade, and though you tell the others to row after us you will never catch us till you catch the oar-thresh and tie up the winds in the belly of the sail. Aho! Will you never let us go?

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

Ease is the pray’r of him who, in a whaleboat Crossing Lake Champlain, by a storm’s o’ertaken: Not struck his blanket, not a friendly island Near to receive him. Ease is the wish too of the sly Canadian; Ease the delight of bloody Caghnawagas; Ease, Richard, ease, not to be bought with wampum, Nor paper money. Nor colonel’s pay, nor yet a dapper sergeant, Orderly waiting with recovered halberd, Can chase the crowd of troubles still surrounding Laced regimentals. That sub lives best who, with a sash in tatters Worn by his grandsire at the fight of Blenheim, To fear a stranger, and to wild ambition, Snores on a bearskin. Why like fine-fellows are we ever scheming, We short-lived mortals? Why so fond of climates Warmed by new suns? O who, that runs from home, can Run from himself too? Care climbs radeaux with four-and-twenty pounders, Not quits our light troops, or our Indian warriors, Swifter than moose-deer, or the fleeter east wind, Pushing the clouds on. He, whose good humor can enjoy the present, Scorns to look forward; with a smile of patience Temp’ring the bitter. Bliss uninterrupted None can inherit. Death instantaneous hurried off Achilles; Age far-extended wore away Tithonus. Who will live longer, thou or I, Montgom’ry? Dicky or Tommy? Thee twenty messmates, full of noise and laughter, Cheer with their sallies; thee the merry damsels Please with their titt’ring; whilst thou sitt’st adorned with Boots, sash and gorget. Me to Fort Hendrick, midst a savage nation, Dull Connajohry, cruel fate has driven. O think on Morris, in a lonely chamber, Dabbling in Sapphic.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

What need you, being come to sense, But fumble in a greasy till And add the halfpence to the pence And prayer to shivering prayer, until You have dried the marrow from the bone; For men were born to pray and save: Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, It’s with O’Leary in the grave. Yet they were of a different kind, The names that stilled your childish play, They have gone about the world like wind, But little time had they to pray For whom the hangman’s rope was spun, And what, God help us, could they save? Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, It’s with O’Leary in the grave. Was it for this the wild geese spread The grey wing upon every tide; For this that all that blood was shed, For this Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave? Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, It’s with O’Leary in the grave. Yet could we turn the years again, And call those exiles as they were In all their loneliness and pain, You’d cry, ‘Some woman’s yellow hair Has maddened every mother’s son’: They weighed so lightly what they gave. But let them be, they’re dead and gone, They’re with O’Leary in the grave.

It keeps on happening again and it will be forgotten again until it’s September. We’re in the tall building paying the bill overdue to the city for gas to fuel our furnace. We’re thinking November— it keeps on happening again—and we’ll need heat. Now it’s still summer, too hot until fall to turn off the AC . Consider that other cloudless day, paying the bill in City Hall. It’s way too high now, still we pay it. Look at the line, at him, her— it keeps on happening again and it will. Energy’s costly. We forget it can kill. Though some of our children can’t remember, we in the building paying the bill look at the date, at the window sill, think of their choice between jump and tinder. It keeps on happening again and it will. We’re in the tall building, paying the bill.

born 19.6.32—deported 24.9.42 Undesirable you may have been, untouchable you were not. Not forgotten or passed over at the proper time. As estimated, you died. Things marched, sufficient, to that end. Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented terror, so many routine cries. (I have made an elegy for myself it is true) September fattens on vines. Roses flake from the wall. The smoke of harmless fires drifts to my eyes. This is plenty. This is more than enough.

1. HELL You’d have to be as crazy as Dante to get those down, the infernal hatreds. Shoot them. Shoot them where they live and then skip town. Or stay and re-engineer the decrepit social contraption to distill the 200-proof elixir of fear and torture the...the what from the what? And didn’t I promise, under threat of self-intubation, not to envision this corridor, coal-tar black, that narrows down and in to a shattering claustrophobia attack before opening out to the lake of frozen shit where the gruesome figure is discerned? Turn around, go home. Just to look at it is to become it. 2. PURGATORY, THE FILM He was chronically out of work, why we don’t know. She was the second born of a set of estranged identical twins. They met, hooked up, and moved in with her mother, who managed a motel on Skyline Drive. But always it was the other, the firstborn, the bad twin, the runaway, he imagined in the shadow of the “Vacancy” sign or watching through the window below the dripping eaves while they made love or slept. The body is relaxed and at rest, the mind is relaxed in its nest, so the self that is and is not itself rises and leaves to peek over the horizon, where it sees all its psychokinetic possibilities resolving into shapely fictions. She was brave, nurturing, kind. She was evil. She was out of her mind. She was a junkie trading sex for a fix, a chief executive, an aviatrix. She was an angel to the blinded and the lamed, the less-than-upright, the infra dig. And she was even a failure. She went to L.A. to make it big and crept back home injured and ashamed. 3. PURGATORY, THE SEQUEL They put him in jail, why we don’t know. They stamped him “Postponed.” But he didn’t mind. The screws were almost kind. He had leisure to get his muscles toned, mental space to regret his crimes, and when he wasn’t fabricating license plates he was free to remember the beauty that not once but a thousand times escaped him forever, and escapes me, too: ghosts of a mist drifting across the face of the stars, Jupiter triangulating with the crescent moon and Mars, prismatic fracturings in a drop of dew... 4. HEAVEN There’s drought on the mountain. Wildfires scour the hills. So the mammal crawls down the desiccated rills searching for the fountain, which it finds, believe it or not, or sort of finds. A thin silver sliver rises from an underground river and makes a few of the hot rocks steam and the pebbles hiss. Soon the mammal will drink, but it has first to stop and think its reflexive, impeccable thought: that thinking comes down to this— mystery, longing, thirst.

If it were not for England, who would bear This heavy servitude one moment more? To keep a brothel, sweep and wash the floor Of filthiest hovels were noble to compare With this brass-cleaning life. Now here, now there Harried in foolishness, scanned curiously o'er By fools made brazen by conceit, and store Of antique witticisms thin and bare. Only the love of comrades sweetens all, Whose laughing spirit will not be outdone. As night-watching men wait for the sun To hearten them, so wait I on such boys As neither brass nor Hell-fire may appal, Nor guns, nor sergeant-major's bluster and noise.

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams, The nearly invisible stitches along the collar Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break Or talking money or politics while one fitted This armpiece with its overseam to the band Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter, The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union, The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven. One hundred and forty-six died in the flames On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes— The witness in a building across the street Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step Up to the windowsill, then held her out Away from the masonry wall and let her drop. And then another. As if he were helping them up To enter a streetcar, and not eternity. A third before he dropped her put her arms Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down, Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers— Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.” Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme Or a major chord.   Prints, plaids, checks, Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian, To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor, Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers To wear among the dusty clattering looms. Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader, The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields: George Herbert, your descendant is a Black Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit And feel and its clean smell have satisfied Both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality Down to the buttons of simulated bone, The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape, The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.