505 History and politics poems

Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning, I hog a whole house on Boston’s “hardly passionate Marlborough Street,” where even the man scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans, has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate, and is a “young Republican.” I have a nine months’ daughter, young enough to be my granddaughter. Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants’ wear. These are the tranquillized Fifties, and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime? I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O., and made my manic statement, telling off the state and president, and then sat waiting sentence in the bull pen beside a Negro boy with curlicues of marijuana in his hair. Given a year, I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a short enclosure like my school soccer court, and saw the Hudson River once a day through sooty clothesline entanglements and bleaching khaki tenements. Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz, a jaundice-yellow (“it’s really tan”) and fly-weight pacifist, so vegetarian, he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit. He tried to convert Bioff and Brown, the Hollywood pimps, to his diet. Hairy, muscular, suburban, wearing chocolate double-breasted suits, they blew their tops and beat him black and blue. I was so out of things, I’d never heard of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. “Are you a C.O.?” I asked a fellow jailbird. “No,” he answered, “I’m a J.W.” He taught me the “hospital tuck,” and pointed out the T-shirted back of Murder Incorporated’s Czar Lepke, there piling towels on a rack, or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full of things forbidden the common man: a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm. Flabby, bald, lobotomized, he drifted in a sheepish calm, where no agonizing reappraisal jarred his concentration on the electric chair— hanging like an oasis in his air of lost connections....

Perhaps, when we the strangers in the bar’s blue light turn liberal, you’d claim fraternity or clan and say Detroit is turned American by the community of appetite. There was this hurried time of fear of the last bell, our sure prognostication it would be somber so soon to face a sky of December that impended on the light blue snow swell, when someone turned and told of Caucasian wheat fields, the harvest sun, a last effrontery. His father decapitates their Turkish master. The village is invested. No one yields. Then, you may know, the last round came, and with it pride. I swivelled round to face my own whiskey recalling anecdotes in turn of ancestral snowfields and running wolves and fireside.

We spend our morning in the flower stalls counting the dark tongues of bells that hang from ropes waiting for the silence of an hour. We find a table, ask for paella, cold soup and wine, where a calm light trembles years behind us. In Buenos Aires only three years ago, it was the last time his hand slipped into her dress, with pearls cooling her throat and bells like these, chipping at the night— As she talks, the hollow clopping of a horse, the sound of bones touched together. The paella comes, a bed of rice and camarones, fingers and shells, the lips of those whose lips have been removed, mussels the soft blue of a leg socket. This is not paella, this is what has become of those who remained in Buenos Aires. This is the ring of a rifle report on the stones, her hand over her mouth, her husband falling against her. These are the flowers we bought this morning, the dahlias tossed on his grave and bells waiting with their tongues cut out for this particular silence.

Who died and made you Elvis? —Bumper sticker The big rock by my door is a plaster prop, after all. I’m back to hear screams for what I can’t do, couldn’t do forty years ago. Awkward pelvic thrusts fooled the camera and virgins, but I have no more fish- fry tunes left to dress up on brand new plates. This time around, I spend all day singing cracked Mississippi homilies. Why did I want to live forever in the first place? Salvation felt better dead, floating home free while my bones, secret and brown, mingle with old dirt.

I King of the perennial holly-groves, the riven sandstone: overlord of the M5: architect of the historic rampart and ditch, the citadel at Tamworth, the summer hermitage in Holy Cross: guardian of the Welsh Bridge and the Iron Bridge: contractor to the desirable new estates: saltmaster: moneychanger: commissioner for oaths: martyrologist: the friend of Charlemagne. ‘I liked that,’ said Offa, ‘sing it again.’ IV I was invested in mother-earth, the crypt of roots and endings. Child’s-play. I abode there, bided my time: where the mole shouldered the clogged wheel, his gold solidus; where dry-dust badgers thronged the Roman flues, the long-unlooked-for mansions of our tribe. V So much for the elves’ wergild, the true governance of England, the gaunt warrior-gospel armoured in engraved stone. I wormed my way heavenward for ages amid barbaric ivy, scrollwork of fern. Exile or pilgrim set me once more upon that ground: my rich and desolate childhood. Dreamy, smug-faced, sick on outings—I who was taken to be a king of some kind, a prodigy, a maimed one. VI The princes of Mercia were badger and raven. Thrall to their freedom, I dug and hoarded. Orchards fruited above clefts. I drank from honeycombs of chill sandstone. ‘A boy at odds in the house, lonely among brothers.’ But I, who had none, fostered a strangeness; gave myself to unattainable toys. Candles of gnarled resin, apple-branches, the tacky mistletoe. ‘Look’ they said and again ‘look.’ But I ran slowly; the landscape flowed away, back to its source. In the schoolyard, in the cloakrooms, the children boasted their scars of dried snot; wrists and knees garnished with impetigo. X He adored the desk, its brown-oak inlaid with ebony, assorted prize pens, the seals of gold and base metal into which he had sunk his name. It was there that he drew upon grievances from the people; attended to signatures and retributions; forgave the death-howls of his rival. And there he exchanged gifts with the Muse of History. What should a man make of remorse, that it might profit his soul? Tell me. Tell everything to Mother, darling, and God bless. He swayed in sunlight, in mild dreams. He tested the little pears. He smeared catmint on his palm for his cat Smut to lick. He wept, attempting to master ancilla and servus. XI Coins handsome as Nero’s; of good substance and weight.Offa Rex resonant in silver, and the names of his moneyers. They struck with accountable tact. They could alter the king’s face. Exactness of design was to deter imitation; mutilation if that failed. Exemplary metal, ripe for commerce. Value from a sparse people, scrapers of salt-pans and byres. Swathed bodies in the long ditch; one eye upstaring. It is safe to presume, here, the king’s anger. He reigned forty years. Seasons touched and retouched the soil. Heathland, new-made watermeadow. Charlock, marsh-marigold. Crepitant oak forest where the boar furrowed black mould, his snout intimate with worms and leaves. XV Tutting, he wrenched at a snarled root of dead crabapple. It rose against him. In brief cavort he was Cernunnos, the branched god, lightly concussed. He divided his realm. It lay there like a dream. An ancient land, full of strategy. Ramparts of compost pioneered by red-helmeted worms. Hemlock in ambush, night-soil, tetanus. A wasps’ nest ensconced in the hedge-bank, a reliquary or wrapped head, the corpse of Cernunnos pitching dayward its feral horns. XVI Clash of salutation. As keels thrust into shingle. Ambassadors, pilgrims. What is carried over? The Frankish gift, two-edged, regaled with slaughter. The sword is in the king’s hands; the crux a craftsman’s triumph. Metal effusing its own fragrance, a variety of balm. And other miracles, other exchanges. Shafts from the winter sun homing upon earth’s rim. Christ’s mass: in the thick of a snowy forest the flickering evergreen fissured with light. Attributes assumed, retribution entertained. What is borne amongst them? Too much or too little. Indulgences of bartered acclaim; an expenditure, a hissing. Wine, urine and ashes. XXVII ‘Now when King Offa was alive and dead’, they were all there, the funereal gleemen: papal legate and rural dean; Merovingian car-dealers, Welsh mercenaries; a shuffle of house-carls. He was defunct. They were perfunctory. The ceremony stood acclaimed. The mob received memorial vouchers and signs. After that shadowy, thrashing midsummer hail-storm, Earth lay for a while, the ghost-bride of livid Thor, butcher of strawberries, and the shire-tree dripped red in the arena of its uprooting. XXX And it seemed, while we waited, he began to walk towards us             he vanished he left behind coins, for his lodging, and traces of red mud.

Turning to weightless implements of gear-click hedging in instamatic blue, our ticking gaze in light like waves, overturning A lifeline, a forerunning wake of life rafts and instruments, luminal seconds in cesium skimmed threshold or eleventh hour draped across the doorjamb. We lack fear of flatness or our impalement on axes, blinking a reticle of stasis: turn it over and begin again, this dripping like TV test patterns. Let’s stay, I say, and buoy ourselves in river locks intercalated in channels or our fender-bent synapses, recycling this floating. Never believing in water torture or autisms as misfortune, we were counting gold in a pointillistic landscape of radiating boulevards. In Budapest, a necropolis of shifting foci grid-dots. Soviet heroes, missing limbs. The thought does not sadden us, but the calculation of sundials: whether flat or equatorial they always deliver this sublimating ice (we are tapping on the ceiling)

i would sit in the center of the world, the Black Hills hooped around me and dream of my dancing horse. my wife was Black Shawl who gave me the daughter i called They Are Afraid Of Her. i was afraid of nothing except Black Buffalo Woman. my love for her i wore instead of feathers. i did not dance i dreamed. i am dreaming now across the worlds. my medicine is strong. my medicine is strong in the Black basket of these fingers. i come again through this Black Buffalo woman. hear me; the hoop of the world is breaking. fire burns in the four directions. the dreamers are running away from the hills. i have seen it. i am crazy horse.

I’m queer for nouns or verbs that end in -ickle, For bouncy trampolines, for trust and bluff. We’re told by those downtown that La Morbid’s dull Renouncing didn’t rustle up enough Bling to dazzle more than a few of them. Turn on a dime, a channel. Those we flip Ring truer than the frilly stratagem Fern bars used to unfurl, and we know zip About karate or brass knucks. To battle The meltdown blues, lay out your Cups and Swords. Don’t doubt the Duke will hop down from the saddle, His belt slung low. Check out the storyboards: Next year he trades his roan for a motorcycle.

The Minister of Culture goes home after a grueling day at the office. He lies on his bed and tries to think of nothing, but nothing hap-pens or, more precisely, does not happen. Nothing is elsewhere doing what nothing does, which is to expand the dark. But the minister is patient, and slowly things slip away—the walls of his house, the park across the street, his friends in the next town. He believes that nothing has finally come to him and, in its absent way, is saying, “Darling, you know how much I have always wanted to please you, and now I have come. And what is more, I have come to stay.”

Back there then I lived across the street from a home for funerals—afternoons I’d look out the shades