505 History and politics poems

How do you recognize a lovely place? The rotten anthropology of superheroes hovers above the conference table, exhausted on the idea of dazzling people. A plugged organization of the moon like a turnpike undecorated by barely legal children — true stories end in the moody doctor city but I always say the wrong thing. Away from Las Vegas I spend too much time at the whale facility. I’m bored with awakening into historical X-rays of the NO MOMENT. (What showmanship!) Who does wear a cape underwater? Now Egypt is miniaturized and it may never rain again. Hurling bodies and collapsing lungs used to be honestly scripted activities — the stillness in the dream of important history. From now on your stillness will be happening. In the actual dream remember how the children were modified, the sputtering, Russel Crotty language? Friendly Calliope is no longer remedial in the crisply American landscape. Even snowy Vermont grows opaque, a diminished suggestion in the desert mirror. I feel as if I’m speaking to a dear friend but I’m saying the wrong things.I don’t like cockfights or you’d rather be my daughter, deeply, authentically factualizing our especially Southern roots.

The Under Secretary leans forward and draws an X and her ear-drops dangle like swords of Damocles. As a mottled butterfly is invisible against the ground so the demon merges with the opened newspaper. A helmet worn by no one has taken power. The mother-turtle flees flying under the water.

It was a party Built for the minuscule elite Lost amid acres of scuffed marble, wanderers Newspapers & schoolwork People knew To speak in surreal, mechanical hyperbole Government, of course Monuments, behemoths Of relative luxury I know what you want to ask I want you to take the truth to the world Down in the city, loudspeakers Disappearing into a hidden gulag Centuries ago The monks appeared Every morning in the lobbies of our hotels A minder was beside them The monks followed us out into the parking lot

Tell me a story, father please, And then I sat upon his knees. Then answer’d he,—“what speech make known, Or tell the words of native tone, Of how my Indian fathers dwelt, And, of sore oppression felt; And how they mourned a land serene, It was an ever mournful theme.” Yes, I replied,—I like to hear, And bring my father’s spirit near; Of every pain they did forego, Oh, please to tell me all you know. In history often I do read, Of pain which none but they did heed. He thus began. “We were a happy race, When we no tongue but ours did trace, We were in ever peace, We sold, we did release— Our brethren, far remote, and far unknown, And spake to them in silent, tender tone. We all were then as in one band, We join’d and took each others hand; Our dress was suited to the clime, Our food was such as roam’d that time, Our houses were of sticks compos’d; No matter,—for they us enclos’d. But then discover’d was this land indeed By European men; who then had need Of this far country. Columbus came afar, And thus before we could say Ah! What meaneth this?—we fell in cruel hands. Though some were kind, yet others then held bands Of cruel oppression. Then too, foretold our chief,— Beggars you will become—is my belief. We sold, then some bought lands, We altogether moved in foreign hands. Wars ensued. They knew the handling of firearms. Mothers spoke,—no fear this breast alarms, They will not cruelly us oppress, Or thus our lands possess. Alas! it was a cruel day; we were crush’d: Into the dark, dark woods we rush’d To seek a refuge. My daughter, we are now diminish’d, unknown, Unfelt! Alas! No tender tone To cheer us when the hunt is done; Fathers sleep,—we’re silent every one. Oh! silent the horror, and fierce the fight, When my brothers were shrouded in night; Strangers did us invade—strangers destroy’d The fields, which were by us enjoy’d. Our country is cultur’d, and looks all sublime, Our fathers are sleeping who lived in the time That I tell. Oh! could I tell them my grief In its flow, that in roaming, we find no relief. I love my country, and shall, until death Shall cease my breath. Now daughter dear I’ve done, Seal this upon thy memory; until the morrow’s sun Shall sink, to rise no more; And if my years should score, Remember this, though I tell no more.”

I Land of Refuge A mountain of white ice standing still in the water here forty fathoms deep and flowing swiftly from the north; grampuses and whales going by in companies, spouting up water in streams (these wonders of the Lord, I, Francis Higginson, saw on the way to Salem); a fair morning, and still many leagues from land, but the air warm and spiced— yellow flowers on the sea, sometimes singly, sometimes in sheets; high trees on every hill and in every dale, on every island, and even on the stony cliffs; banks of earth on which are groves of trees, and no undergrowth of bush or brambles; the sandy shore overrun with vines of melons and of grapes which the beat and surging of the sea overflows (this I, Arthur Barlowe, saw); trees of sweet-smelling wood with rind and leaves sweet-smelling as the bark of cinnamon and leaves of bay; soil dark and soft, strawberries everywhere, hickory nuts and sassafras; here are grapes white and red, very sweet and strong, and plums, black and red, and single roses, white and red and damask; we have eaten venison with the Indians, and drunk water with spice in it— Indian corn, even the coarsest, makes as pleasant a meat as rice. (Without any show of anger the Iroquois crunched our fingers in their mouths, and with their teeth tore off the nails; then hacked our fingers off, joint by joint, with stone hatchets, or with a shell too dull to cut the sinews; and in the stumps of our thumbs drove up spikes until the elbow; but so great the help of Jesus, with this maimed hand I, Isaac Jogues, Jesuit and priest, baptised an Indian among the captives, using the raindrops on a long leaf of corn.) Let others cry, “New lands! where Indians shall bring kernels of gold, wagons full of gold; whatever spills upon the way we shall tread carelessly, for we shall have so much of gold— so many pearls to sew upon our clothes; away, unthrifty gentlemen, to the forests of Virginia! There are lands to feed all the poor of England, trees to build each a home; give us but axes, shovels, and ploughshares, and away then to America, all you poor!” In England a watch is set about us and we are clapt in jails, and Holland is a dear place, for there they live by trading— but we are a plain country people whose trade is husbandry, and we would worship God as simply as the shepherds and Galilean fishermen, live as plainly; away, dissenters, to New England! A great wind is blowing, heavy rain— thick darkness; the sailors running here and there, shouting at one another to pull at this and at that rope, and the waves pouring over the ship; landing in the rain— the cold rain falling steadily; the ground wet, all the leaves dripping, and the rocks running with water; the sky is cloud on cloud in which the brief sun barely shines, the ground snow on snow, the cold air wind and blast; we have followed our God into this wilderness of trees heavy with snow, rocks seamed with ice, that in the freezing blasts the remnant of this remnant kindle so bright, so lasting a fire on this continent, prisoners of ice and darkness everywhere will turn and come to it to warm their hands and hearts. II Brief History Glaciers pushing so far and surely thaw and withdraw; even the deep, while the explosion of its waves dynamites the cliffs, leaves new lands, new groves and habitations beside the glittering currents flowing quickly into the silver waters of the sun. Here are men who find a comfortable bed among the rocks, who wrap themselves in their coats to sleep upon the ground while their horse feeds in the grass beside the lake; who catch trout in the brook and roast them on the ashes; eat the flesh of bear for meat, the white meat of turkeys for their bread, and whose salt is brought in an iron pot across the mountains; who live where two hundred acres may be had for a calf and a wool hat; or walk where there is no road nor any man, except the savage. All the bells of Boston are tolling a solemn peal; the market men will take no more paper money— hard money only; soldiers with bare feet showing through their shoes in the snow, the smoke of the camp-fires blowing into their eyes; for food a bowl of beef soup full of burnt leaves; no house or hut, and even the sick in tents. The rays of your light, like the sun’s, Republic of France, shone first in the west; the eater shall give meat, and out of the strong sweetness— out of the bones of the French monarchy the honey of freedom; the bells of Philadelphia are ringing as if for a fire, and the crowds, shouting and hallooing, fill the streets; ring, bells, throughout the night, let no one sleep; ring, clash, and peal until the log cabins and cottages of cedar shingles, the houses of grey stone or of brick, tremble, and the listeners feel in their flesh the vibrations of your metal voices ringing, Proclaim liberty, proclaim liberty throughout the land! Wrongs, like molecules of gas that seep into a house, explode in particles of fire! A captain gallops down the street, wheels, and the hoof of his horse sends the pie plates shining in the sun, his horse stops at what is flowing from the battlefield, sniffs at it, and will not cross; this is not water— it is blood in a thick and ropy stream. (The dying Negress says, I cannot eat dry hominy: I lived in Massa’s house, and used to have white bread and coffee; and I want something sweet in my mouth.) On the lawn the Negroes dance and clap their hands, So glad! so glad! Bless the Lord for freedom! So glad! so glad! Do not mourn the dandelions— that their golden heads become grey in no time at all and are blown about in the wind; each season shall bring them again to the lawns; but how long the seeds of justice stay underground, how much blood and ashes of precious things to manure so rare and brief a growth. Currents of waste wind along the river between the factories— the colonnades and sacred groves of chimneys; where once the road in ruts and ridges—lines of rails hold to a gleaming purpose, come wind, come rain, come winter or the night; build storey on storey out of glass; light electric lights, row after row, whose shining wires will not flicker in the wind; let the streets sound with the horns and hosannahs of motor cars! Man, you need no longer drudge at plow or oar, no longer trudge; proclaim this liberty to all! If bread may be as plentiful, shall we not share it as we share water?

The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets red glare” and then there are the bombs. (Always, always, there is war and bombs.) Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw even the tenacious high school band off key. But the song didn’t mean anything, just a call to the field, something to get through before the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps, the truth is, every song of this country has an unsung third stanza, something brutal snaking underneath us as we blindly sing the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands hoping our team wins. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the flag, how it undulates in the wind like water, elemental, and best when it’s humbled, brought to its knees, clung to by someone who has lost everything, when it’s not a weapon, when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly you can keep it until it’s needed, until you can love it again, until the song in your mouth feels like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung by even the ageless woods, the short-grass plains, the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left unpoisoned, that song that’s our birthright, that’s sung in silence when it’s too hard to go on, that sounds like someone’s rough fingers weaving into another’s, that sounds like a match being lit in an endless cave, the song that says my bones are your bones, and your bones are my bones, and isn’t that enough?

I / omen What was going on in the New York American Black/red/green helmeted neon night? The elevator door was closing behind us, we were the ones Plunging floor after floor after floor after floor To the abyss—but it was someone else’s face Staring from the screen out at us, someone else’s face Saying something flashing from the teleprompter: Though what the face said was meant to reassure, Down in the abyss the footage kept playing, All of it looping back like children chanting The answers to nonsensical riddles, taunting A classmate who doesn’t know the question: “Because it’s too far to walk” “Time to get a new fence” “A big red rock eater.” And as the images rewound And the face kept talking, the clear night sky Filled up with smoke and the smoke kept puring Itself out into the air like a voice saying something It can’t stop saying, some murky omen Like schoolkids asking: “Why do birds fly south?” “What time is it when an elephant sits on the fence?” “What’s big, red and eats rocks?” 2 / in front of st. vincent’s A woman hugging another woman Who was weeping blocked the sidewalk. Nobody moved for a moment. They were an island caught at the tide turning: Such misery in two human bodies. Then the wearing away of the crowd Moving flowed over them and they Were pulled swiftly along down the sidewalk. 3 / joke Faces powdered with dust and ash, there they were In the fast food place, raucous and wild, splitting The seams of their work clothes, weary to hysteria As they hunched in their booth next to the buffet Under heat lamps reflecting incarnadine Off pastas and vegetable slag. Then the joke Ignited, they quivered on the launch pad, Laughter closed around them, they couldn’t Breathe, it was as if they were staring out From a space capsule porthole and were asking The void an imponderable riddle While orbiting so high up in space That the earth was less than the least hint Of light piercing the smoke-filled, cloudless night. (What was the joke about? Nobody knew.) And then they stopped laughing and stared into their plates, Ash smearing down their faces as they chewed. 4 / spell spoken by suppliant to helios for knowledge from the Greek Magical Papyri Under my tongue is the mud of the Nile, I wear the baboon hide of sacred Keph. Dressed in the god’s power, I am the god, I am Thouth, discoverer of healing drugs, Founder of letters. As god calls on god I summon you to come to me, you Under the earth; arouse yourself for me, Great daimon, you the subterranean, You of the primordial abyss. Unless you tell me what I want to know, What is in the minds of everyone, Egyptians, Greeks, Syrians, Ethiopians, of every race And people, unless I know what has been And what shall be, unless I know their skills And practices and works and lives and names Of them and their fathers and mothers And brothers and friends, even of those now dead, I will pour the blood of the black-faced jackal As an offering in a new-made jar and put it In the fire and burn beneath it what’s left Of the bones of all-praised Osiris, And I will shout in the port of Busiris The secrets of his mysteries, that his body, Drowned, remained in the river three days And three nights, that he, the praised one, Was carried by the river into the sea And surrounded by wave on wave on wave And by mist rising off water through the air. To keep your belly from being eaten by fish, To keep the fish from chewing your flesh with their mouths, To make the fish close their hungry jaws, to keep The fatherless child from being taken From his mother, to keep the pole of the sky From being brought down and the twin towering Mountains from toppling into one, to keep Anoixis From running amok and doing just what she wants, Not god or goddess will give oracles Until I know through and through Just what is in the minds of all human beings, Egyptians, Syrians, Greeks, Ethyopians, of every race And people, so that those who come to me. Their eyes and mine can meet in a level gaze, Neither one or the other higher or lower, And whether they speak or keep silent, I can tell them whatever has happened And is happening and is going to happen To them, and I can tell them their skills And their works and their names and those of their dead, And of every human being who comes to me I will read them as I read a sealed letter And tell them everything truthfully. 5 / from brooklyn bridge Sun shines on the third bridge tower: A garbage scow ploughs the water, Maternal hull pushing is all out beyond The city, pushing it all out so patiently— All you could hear out there this flawless afternoon Is the sound of sand pulverizing newsprint To tatters, paper-pulp ripping crosswise Or lengthwise, shearing off some photo Of maybe a head or maybe an arm. Ridiculous flimsy noble newspaper, Leaping in wind, fluttering, collapsing, Its columns sway and topple into babble: All you’d see if you were out there Is air vanishing into clearer air. 6 / from the plane Pressed against our seats, them released to air, From the little plane windows we peered four thousand feet Down to the ground desert-gray and still, Nothing seeming to be moving on that perfect afternoon, No reminder of why it was we were all looking, Remembering maybe the oh so flimsy Wooden sawhorse police barricades, as the woman In front of me twisted her head back to see It all again, but up there there was nothing to see, Only the reef water feel of transparency Deepening down to a depth where everything Goes dark and nothing moves unless it belongs To that dark, darting in and out or undulating Slowly or cruising unblinking, jaws open or closed. 7 / spell broken by suppliant to helios for protection from the Greek Magical Papyri This is the charm that will protect you, the charm That you must wear: Onto lime wood write With vermilion the secret name, name of The fifty magic letters. Then say the words: “Guard me from every daimon of the air, On the earth and under the earth, guard me From every angel and phantom, every Ghostly visitation and enchantment, Me, your suppliant.” Enclose it in a skin Dyed purple, hang it round your neck and wear it. 8 / roll of film: photographer missing Vines of smoke through latticework of steel Weave the air into a garden of smoke. And in the garden people came and went, People of smoke and people of flesh, the air dressed In ash. What the pictures couldn’t say Was spoken by the smoke: A common language In a tongue of smoke that murmured in every ear Something about what it was they’d been forced To endure: Words spoken in duress, Inconsolable words, words spoken under the earth That rooted in smoke and breathed in the smoke And put forth shoots that twined through the steel, Words plunged through the roof of the garages’ Voids, I-beams twisted; the eye that saw all this Tells and tells again one part of the story Of that day of wandering through the fatal garden, The camera’s eye open and acutely Recording in the foul-smelling air. 9 / lamentation on ur from a Sumerian spell, 2000 B.C. Like molten bronze and iron shed blood pools. Our country’s dead melt into the earth as grease melts in the sun, men whose helmets now lie scattered, men annihilated by the double-bladed axe. Heavy, beyond help, they lie still as a gazelle exhausted in a trap, muzzle in the dust. In home after home, empty doorways frame the absence of mothers and fathers who vanished in the flames remorselessly spreading claiming even frightened children who lay quiet in their mother’s arms, now borne into oblivion, like swimmers swept out to sea by the surging current. May the great barred gate of blackest night again swing shut on silent hinges. Destroyed in its turn, may this disaster too be torn out of mind.

That night the moon over New Hampshire wore a face I knew in high school of a pudgy boy whose mother was a singer and whose sister was once trapped in a burning building. When she was a girl, my sister and 17 of her classmates could not leave school because the janitor ran amok. The moonlight on the lake glides like Persian slippers wingtipping on the surface of the water. And the road with its arms around the lake is silent and American. In Thai,Sasithon stands for full moon, a name for a woman who once saw a pair of hands on the dashboard of my car. Not hers, but of another who died a violent death. In the whir of static between Top Forty and twang, I listened to the news report of Pol Pot’s capture. And like a man whose bowl of soup has grown too cold to eat, I realized that I had overdriven— missed the road I was supposed to turn into. In a false memory, I look back at the burning building that claimed my classmate’s sister. I see her moonface veiled in blue— blue as a flame of a lit match telling me the road I missed on the map. I could pull over and rest my eyes. I could sleep like an entire race of bones underneath the tall grasses where a man hacks and hacks at something in the heat. Once in a while he might stop to examine the pattern of a tattered fabric suspended on the tip of his machete, and try to remember his wife.

They go, the early flags, the gory maples— so too the daffodils & Lenten roses. Other petals swirl & nights warm. Buds thicken and cast shadows: in a thunderstorm I almost forget the ice that was. Narcissi suckle watery paths; meadows heap up emerald masses. How green & I want to delight except this undertow—it pulls so fast passing before I recognize it— like souls in Dante who can’t see the present, white lilacs curdle in pre-summer heat. The parade I barely noticed was beginning is already halfway down the street.

Mayor. Worldman. Historyman. Beyond steps that occur and close, your steps are echo-makers. You can never be forgotten. We begin our health. We enter the Age of Alliance. This is our senior adventure.