505 History and politics poems

Proxies—pertinent, prominent, proximate— impose war, sustain it. The Empire ever absent and seemingly elsewhere— evasive, persuasive, pervasive. Things are this complicated.

i Eye of the hurricane the Battery, the Hudson breached, millions of gallons of it north on West Street filling Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel, overflowing into the World Trade Center site, East River, six-to-eight-foot wall of water on South, Front, Water, John, Fulton, Pearl, Brooklyn Bridge’s woven cables lifted delicately in hurricane sky. ii Perhaps I make too much of it, that time, Eldon Axle, brake plates dipped in some sort of liquid to protect them from dust, dirt, metal chips the grinding caused — that time, night shift, press-machine shop on Outer Drive, rolls of stainless steel put in, fixed up, because the work you do is around fire your cuticles burn if the mask’s not on right. iii When the mind is clear, to hear the sound of a voice, of voices, shifts in the attitude of syllables pronounced. When the mind is clear, to see a Sunday, in August, Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation, Carey, Ohio, at a holy water font, a mother washes her six-year-old’s fingers crushed in an accident so that they’ll heal. iv So what percentage of Weasel Boy’s DNA do you think is pure weasel? Tooth-twisted, Yeats’s weasels, in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” fighting in a hole. v Conflated, the finance vectors, opaque cyber-surveillance, supranational cartels, in the corporate state’s political-economic singularity the greatest number of children in United States history are, now, incarcerated, having been sentenced by law. vi A comic dimension to it, on this F train to One Hundred Sixty-Ninth Street in Queens? He doesn’t want to disturb you, but, see, he was stabbed in the face with an ice pick, he lost his left eye — lid pried open with thumb and forefinger — here, look, he’ll show you — a white-and-pink-colored iris.

As one in dowte, thys ys my ssayyng: Have I dysplesed yow in any thyng? —Thomas Wyatt That greasy letter into which my legs entered, its tone conspiratorial as his wink, a linguistic wriggling of the eyebrows, a heh heh —it may as well have appeared before my door chafing the air with the stiff noise of its cheap leather jacket. Am I not chagrined by his proposition to put it all behind us and begin again as friends? How do I reply? And how shall I contend with the fact, Reader, that this matter cannot mean much to you, and that I, as author, am required to consider how to tell this tale in a manner that will entertain you, despite having never met you and having no way of knowing how to affect you, get you to let me touch you all over, kiss your lips then tongue your mouth open, move my mouth down your neck to the valley of your chest, pluck buttons off you with my teeth. I have thought of this for a great, long time. I have sat here hunched, feeling sick; I have paced rugs bare. Why should you care? His door opened, selves spilled out my heart's bucket, flopped their silvers across a floor. He was too poor to enter a store, too poor to pay postage for a letter, so poor he'd have stolen crumbs from a mouse, so poor he'd have sold his cadaver if he could. Yet, consider the man: his deep voice began to work away at my inhibitions like sandpaper. Before I knew it, I'd moved right into him, wiped the eyes of windows clear, mended the tears in his screens, made our bed with sheets so icy clean— but you do not want me to give too much away. What fun would that be? Here, as with any tale, the moral's like a molar, set far back in the mouth of the story. Open wider, let me stick my pliers in, wrench it out. Left unattended, anything's prone to spoil, go bad, turn rotten, sink into itself, stink up the whole house. And how shall I begin to make my account? Dig through the junk heap. Start small. He grew over me calmly as a vine climbs a trellis. Your nightgown is unbecoming. A few small terrorisms. Eyes wide at my wince, incredulous. You thought I'd hit you?

XXI Dynasty My body holds its shape. The genius is intact. Will I return to Thebes? In that lost country The eucalyptus trees have turned to stone. Once, branches nudged me, dropping swollen blossoms, And passionflowers lit my father’s garden. Is it still there, that place of mottled shadow, The scarlet flowers breathing in the darkness? I remember how I died. It was so simple! One morning the garden faded. My face blacked out. On my left side they made the first incision. They washed my heart and liver in palm wine— My lungs were two dark fruit they stuffed with spices. They smeared my innards with a sticky unguent And sealed them in a crock of alabaster. My brain was next. A pointed instrument Hooked it through my nostrils, strand by strand. A voice swayed over me. I paid no notice. For weeks my body swam in sweet perfume. I came out scoured. I was skin and bone. They lifted me into the sun again And packed my empty skull with cinnamon. They slit my toes; a razor gashed my fingertips. Stitched shut at last, my limbs were chaste and valuable, Stuffed with paste of cloves and wild honey. My eyes were empty, so they filled them up, Inserting little nuggets of obsidian. A basalt scarab wedged between my breasts Replaced the tinny music of my heart. Hands touched my sutures. I was so important! They oiled my pores, rubbing a fragrance in. An amber gum oozed down to soothe my temples. I wanted to sit up. My skin was luminous, Frail as the shadow of an emerald. Before I learned to love myself too much, My body wound itself in spools of linen. Shut in my painted box, I am a precious object. I wear a wooden mask. These are my eyelids, Two flakes of bronze, and here is my new mouth, Chiseled with care, guarding its ruby facets. I will last forever. I am not impatient— My skin will wait to greet its old complexions. I’ll lie here till the world swims back again. When I come home the garden will be budding, White petals breaking open, clusters of night flowers, The far-off music of a tambourine. A boy will pace among the passionflowers, His eyes no longer two bruised surfaces. I’ll know the mouth of my young groom, I’ll touch His hands. Why do people lie to one another?

It is true, that even in the best-run state Such things will happen; it is true, What’s done is done. The law, whereby we hate Our hatred, sees no fire in the flue But by the smoke, and not for thought alone It punishes, but for the thing that’s done. And yet there is the horror of the fact, Though we knew not the man. To die in jail, To be beaten to death, to know the act Of personal fury before the eyes can fail And the man die against the cold last wall Of the lonely world—and neither is that all: There is the terror too of each man’s thought, That knows not, but must quietly suspect His neighbor, friend, or self of being taught To take an attitude merely correct; Being frightened of his own cold image in The glass of government, and his own sin, Frightened lest senate house and prison wall Be quarried of one stone, lest righteous and high Look faintly smiling down and seem to call A crime the welcome chance of liberty, And any man an outlaw who aggrieves The patriotism of a pair of thieves.

The shirtless man by the ticket counter has already broken the gloom here, his crowd of two boys and the cashier with the Star of David gathered around and mouthing astonishment as he tells the tale behind every scar. Yes, this one on the side was from the camp — he tells them not to be shy to ask — when he tripped into the ditch on the run after stealing cigarettes, the one on the knuckle from punching the soldier in the bar, brave with whiskey, a decade after. Touch it, he snarls, jutting out his fist. That split a real Nazi’s lip. In the rooms behind him, the voices lay low but touch is the rule, the extended families passing in fours and fives as tight as at church or the carnival. Are they all survivors here, dazed and exhilarated by the fate that dropped them so far from blight? A father heads the line, shirt fat with muscles and a single proud thumb pushing the stroller; the woman and girl hug sideways, then again, tight as dancers in a row. At each display, the time lines and the whispered assurances reiterate that what is done is done. Pol Pot is dead, the children of Kampuchea reading again to go to college; Rwanda has forgiven itself and opened supermarkets; the ghettos are demolished, the Cold War won. Sudan, they skip. For now, the beasts are gone. They face the new life, the one after the mending, after the last mistakes were made.

The year I was born the atomic bomb went off. Here I'd just begun, and someone found the switch to turn off the world. In the furnace-light, in the central solar fire of that heat lamp, the future got very finite, and it was possible to imagine time-travelers failing to arrive, because there was no future. Inside the great dark clock in the hall, heavy brass cylinders descended. Tick-tock, the chimes changed their tune one phrase at a time. The bomb became a film star, its glamorous globe of smoke searing the faces of men in beach chairs. Someone threw up every day at school. No time to worry about collective death, when life itself was permeated by ordeals. And so we grew up, beneath an umbrella of acceptance. In bio we learned there were particles cruising through us like whales through archipelagoes, and in civics that if Hitler had gotten the bomb he'd have used it on the inferior races, and all this time love was etching its scars on our skins like maps. The heavens remained pure, except for little white slits on the perfect blue skin that planes cut in the icy upper air, like needles sewing. From one, a tiny seed might fall that would make a sun on earth. And so the century passed, with me still in it, books waiting on the shelves to become cinders, what we felt locked up inside, waiting to be read, down the long corridor of time. I was born the year the bomb exploded. Twice whole cities were charred like cities in the Bible, but we didn't look back. We went on thinking we could go on, our shapes the same, darkened now against a background lit by fire. Forgive me for doubting you're there, Citizens, on your holodecks with earth wallpaper— a shadow-toned ancestor with poorly pressed pants, protected like a child from knowing the future.

Of course you have faced the dilemma: it is announced, they all smirk and rise. If they are ultra, they remove their hats and look ecstatic; then they look at you. What shall you do?Noblesse oblige; you cannot be boorish, or ungracious; and too, after all it is your country and you do love its ideals if not all of its realities. Now, then, I have thought of a way out: Arise, gracefully remove your hat, and tilt your head. Then sing as follows, powerfully and with deep unction. They’ll hardly note the little changes and their feelings and your conscience will thus be saved: My country tis of thee, Late land of slavery, Of thee I sing. Land where my father’s pride Slept where my mother died, From every mountain side Let freedom ring! My native country thee Land of the slave set free, Thy fame I love. I love thy rocks and rills And o’er thy hate which chills, My heart with purpose thrills, To rise above. Let laments swell the breeze And wring from all the trees Sweet freedom’s song. Let laggard tongues awake, Let all who hear partake, Let Southern silence quake, The sound prolong. Our fathers’ God to thee Author of Liberty, To thee we sing Soon may our land be bright, With Freedom’s happy light Protect us by Thy might, Great God our King.

Day by day the Missouri dropping lower under empty sky that had drained Okobojo, No Heart Creek, Whiteman Draw; every night still no moisture. Finally, a season late, the raw parched air turned and gathered over hardpan above Oahe, grumbling then breaking open all at once, sending runnels across the flats to spread and join and drag toward the river’s edge snatches of roots torn from ground where wind had settled the seeds once. Afterwards Will and Ellie, tromping in mud, scanned the rutted cow-paths for arrowheads that might've surfaced—traces of Black Buffalo, Big Foot, Touch the Clouds—quartz or chert or flint notched, chipped to different sizes and points for buffalo, deer, pheasant flushed out with a human howl, maybe with fire lit to the grasses, bitter scent of ash twisting in dust Ellie could smell like her own name unraveling, as she poked a glittering rock with her stick, heard the  meadowlarks question change to sputter, last flick of wings. Whatever she and Will might lift, turn over in their hands, take home, hide among their things—even relief after rain did not belong to them.

Children, when was Napoleon Bonaparte born, asks teacher. A thousand years ago, the children say. A hundred years ago, the children say. Last year, the children say. No one knows. Children, what did Napoleon Bonaparte do, asks teacher. Won a war, the children say. Lost a war, the children say. No one knows. Our butcher had a dog called Napoleon, says Frantisek. The butcher used to beat him and the dog died of hunger a year ago. And all the children are now sorry for Napoleon.