505 History and politics poems

There was no room for us to have feelings. Under the Queen, we were foiled, our faces blanked of wonder. A pitiful ordeal, our cheap toil. We hated her for stealing. Our crooked backs ached; our knees bled from kneeling, the whole sum of our treasures given up to fund her. There was no room for us to have feelings, so we made our way quietly; we arranged our own dealings, checked what we clocked. Each swallowed their thunder and railed within. Nothing left out for stealing. But pound for pound, we grew skinny, weary, reeling from the new rules she devised. We had to watch and mind her. There was no room for us to have feelings. We were audited, then fined. We abided her schooling. Then, all music stopped. All solitude filled, we couldn't ponder our losses. We tried to forget how much she was stealing. Our patron saints left us; the stars took to jeering, leering at our lessened state. We hardened at our blunder. There was no room to have any feelings. What of us? Not a pittance. No worth there for stealing.

For Pos Moua What is the name for an antelope who grazes inside a dream then vanishes into the nebula’s brush. What is the face for refurbishing grammar at each comma’s lip. Whose identity never remembers the shape of beige. What is the word for how to conjure the sigh of a line hushed beneath the flap of a thousand shifting plumes. What is the body of a garden where a crescent despairs, drifts beneath the melt of amber. The season is always growing out its hooves. One cradlesong of your leaving is not larger than the forest of your arrival. To make you a noun forever. A loss of you cannot be equal to the loss of you.

1 At focus in the national Park’s ellipse a marker Draws tight the guys of Miles, opposite the national Obelisk with its restless oval Peoples who shall be Deeply drawn to its Austerities: or For a moment try the mystery Of the god-like eye, before Our long climb down past relic Schoolboy names and states And one foolish man Climbs up, his death high In his elliptic face. 2 A double highway little Used in early spring Goes to the end of the land Where Washington’s chandeliers Are kept, his beds and chairs, His roped-off relic kitchen Spits, his pans; his floors Are worn underneath the dead Pilgrims’ feet; outside The not-so-visited tomb; And over the field and fence His legendary river: And so I walk although The day is cold for this; I eat a thin slice Of bread and one remarkable Egg perfectly shaped, A perfect oriental por- Celain sheen of white. Suddenly the lost Ghosts of his life Broke from the trees and from the cold Mud pools where he played A boy and set as a man The sand glint of his boot, The flick of his coat on the weeds; His wheels click in the single road.

Today the moon sees fit to come between a parched earth and sun, hurrying the premature darkness. A rooster in the yard cuts off its crowing, fooled into momentary sleep. And soon the Perseid showers, broken bits of the ancient universe, will pass through the skin of our atmosphere. Time and space are alive over our city. Final eclipse of the sun, last of this millennium, our city’s brightness broken off. We have known other dark hours: Here, coffin that slowly passes, I give you my sprig of lilac— Lincoln’s death, winding procession toward sleep. We have known slave coffles and holding pens in yards not half a mile from our Capitol, wooden palings sunk in earth to guarantee none would escape. In this freest city. Oh if earth could talk. Earth does talk in the neatly framed yards where death thinks to lay us down to rest. Asleep, the marker stones. But not the voices, jagged bits of memory, shards of poems. Sterling Brown. Our human possessions and all they've left us. This whole city sings their songs. Say their names. In this city they are our monuments: Frederick Douglass, our Rayford Logan, Alain Locke, Franklin Frazier, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, May Miller: Not sleep but garlands left to us. Montague Cobb, William Hastie. Yards of names. And here, the place where we unearth an immigrant father of seven. He leans down—no earthly reason for his choice—to pick up his nearest child. A yard-long rack of brooms behind him, a bin of apples. Not the sleep of cold, but autumn in Washington. 1913 or a bit later. He stands awkwardly on 4 1/2 Street, S. W. Our street photographer, who’s just come by with his city chatter, ducks beneath a dark cloth. Monuments of the city behind him, he leans over his black box camera in time to capture that moment when the child will play her bit part, pushing away from her father like a boat from shore. In the sleep of winter, years later, she will become my mother. What yardstick by which to measure importance? To measure earthly agency? Each of us has monuments in the bone case of memory. Earth- bound, I take my sac of marble and carry it down lonely city streets where our generals on horseback and a tall bearded man keep watch over all their citizens.

At four in the morning he wakes to the yawn of brakes, the snore of a diesel engine. Gone. All she left is a froth of bra and panties. The scum of the Seine and the Farset. Gallogly squats in his own pelt. A sodium street light his brought a new dimension to their black taxi. By the time they force an entry he’ll have skedaddled among hen runs and pigeon lofts. The charter flight from Florida touched down at Aldergrove minutes earlier, at 3.54 a.m. Its excess baggage takes the form of Mangas Jones, Esquire, who is, as it turns out, Apache. He carries only hand luggage. ‘Anything to declare?’ He opens the powder-blue attaché- case. ‘A pebble of quartz.’ ‘You’re an Apache?’ ‘Mescalero.’ He follows the corridor’s arroyo till the signs read Hertz. He is going to put his foot down on a patch of waste ground along the Stranmillis embankment when he gets wind of their impromptu fire. The air above the once-sweet stream is aquarium- drained. And six, maybe seven, skinheads have formed a quorum round a burnt-out heavy-duty tyre. So intent on sniffing glue they may not notice Gallogly, or, if they do, are so far gone. Three miles west as the crow flies an all-night carry-out provides the cover for an illegal drinking club. While the bar man unpacks a crate of Coca-Cola, one cool customer takes on all comers in a video game. He grasps what his two acolytes have failed to seize. Don’t they know what kind of take-away this is, the glipes? Vietmanese. Viet-ma-friggin’-knees. He drops his payload of napalm. Gallogly is wearing a candy-stripe king-size sheet, a little something he picked up off a clothes line. He is driving a milk van he borrowed from the Belfast Co-op while the milkman’s back was turned. He had given the milkman a playful rabbit punch. When he stepped on the gas he flooded the street with broken glass. He is trying to keep a low profile. The unmarked police car draws level with his last address. A sergeant and eight constables pile out of a tender and hammer up the stairs. The street bristles with static. Their sniffer dog, a Labrador bitch, bursts into the attic like David Balfour in Kidnapped. A constable on his first dawn swoop leans on a shovel. He has turned over a new leaf in her ladyship’s herb patch. They’ll take it back for analysis. All a bit much after the night shift to meet a milkman who’s double-parked his van closing your front door after him. He’s sporting your Donegal tweed suit and your Sunday shoes and politely raises your hat as he goes by. You stand there with your mouth open as he climbs into the still-warm driving seat of your Cortina and screeches off towards the motorway, leaving you uncertain of your still-warm wife’s damp tuft. Someone on their way to early Mass will find her hog-tied to the chapel gates— O Child of Prague- big-eyed, anorexic. The lesson for today is pinned to her bomber jacket. It seems to read Keep off the Grass. Her lovely head has been chopped and changed. For Beatrice, whose fathers knew Louis Quinze, to have come to this, her perruque of tar and feathers. He is pushing the maroon Cortina through the sedge on the banks of the Callan. It took him a mere forty minutes to skite up the Ml. He followed the exit sign for Loughgall and hared among the top-heavy apple orchards. This stretch of the Armagh/Tyrone border was planted by Warwickshiremen who planted in turn their familiar quick-set damson hedges. The Cortina goes to the bottom. Gallogly swallows a plummy-plum-plum. ‘I’ll warrant them’s the very pair o’ boys I seen abroad in McParland’s bottom, though where in under God— for thou art so possessed with murd’rous hate— where they come from God only knows.’ ‘They were mad for a bite o’ mate, I s’pose.’ ‘I doubt so. I come across a brave dale o’ half-chawed damsels. Wanst wun disappeared I follied the wun as yelly as Indy male.’ ‘Ye weren’t afeared?’ ‘I follied him.’ ‘God save us.’ ‘An’ he driv away in a van belongin’ t’Avis.’ The grass sprightly as Astroturf in the September frost and a mist here where the ground is low He seizes his own wrist as if, as if Blind Pew again seized Jim at the sign of the ‘Admiral Benbow’. As if Jim Hawkins led Blind Pew to Billy Bones and they were all one and the same, he stares in disbelief at an aspirin-white spot he pressed into his own palm. Gallogly’s thorn-proof tweed jacket is now several sizes too big. He has flopped down in a hay shed to ram a wad of hay into the toe of each of his ill-fitting brogues, when he gets the drift of ham and eggs. Now he’s led by his own wet nose to the hacienda-style farmhouse, a baggy-kneed animated bear drawn out of the woods by an apple pie left to cool on a windowsill. She was standing at the picture window with a glass of water and a Valium when she caught your man in the reflection of her face. He came shaping past the milking parlour as if he owned the place. Such is the integrity of their quarrel that she immediately took down the legally held shotgun and let him have both barrels. She had wanted only to clear the air. Half a mile away across the valley her husband’s U.D.R. patrol is mounting a check-point. He pricks up his ears at the crack of her prematurely arthritic hip- joint, and commandeers one of the jeeps. There now, only a powder burn as if her mascara had run. The bloody puddle in the yard, and the shilly-shally of blood like a command wire petering out behind a milk churn. A hole in the heart, an ovarian cyst. Coming up the Bann in a bubble. Disappearing up his own bum. Or, running on the spot with all the minor aplomb of a trick-cyclist. So thin, side-on, you could spit through him. His six foot of pump water bent double in agony or laughter. Keeping down-wind of everything. White Annetts. Gillyflowers. Angel Bites. When he names the forgotten names of apples he has them all off pat. His eye like the eye of a travelling rat lights on the studied negligence of these scraws of turf. A tarpaulin. A waterlogged pit. He will take stock of the Kalashnikov’s filed-down serial number, seven sticks of unstable commercial gelignite that have already begun to weep. Red Strokes. Sugar Sweet. Widows Whelps. Buy him a drink and he’ll regale you with how he came in for a cure one morning after the night before to the Las Vegas Lounge and Cabaret. He was crossing the bar’s eternity of parquet floor when his eagle eye saw something move on the horizon. If it wasn’t an Indian. A Sioux. An ugly Sioux. He means, of course, an Oglala Sioux busily tracing the family tree of an Ulsterman who had some hand in the massacre at Wounded Knee. He will answer the hedge-sparrow’s Littlebitofbreadandnocheese with a whole bunch of freshly picked watercress, a bulb of garlic, sorrel, with many-faceted blackberries. Gallogly is out to lunch. When his cock rattles its sabre he takes it in his dab hand, plants one chaste kiss on its forelock, and then, with a birl and a skirl, tosses it off like a caber. The U.D.R. corporal had come off duty to be with his wife while the others set about a follow-up search. When he tramped out just before twelve to exercise the greyhound he was hit by a single high-velocity shot. You could, if you like, put your fist in the exit wound in his chest. He slumps in the spume of his own arterial blood like an overturned paraffin lamp. Gallogly lies down in the sheugh to munch through a Beauty of Bath. He repeats himself,Bath, under his garlic-breath. Sheugh, he says.Sheugh. He is finding that first ‘sh’ increasingly difficult to manage. Sh-leeps. A milkmaid sinks her bare foot to the ankle in a simmering dung hill and fills the slot with beastlings for him to drink. In Ovid’s conspicuously tongue-in-cheek account of an eyeball to eyeball between the goddess Leto and a shower of Lycian reed cutters who refuse her a cup of cloudy water from their churned-up lake, Live then forever in that lake of yours, she cries, and has them bubble and squeak and plonk themselves down as bullfrogs In their icy jissom. A country man kneels on his cap beside his neighbour’s fresh grave-mud as Gallogly kneels to lap the primrose-yellow custard. The knees of his hand-me-down duds are gingerish. A pernickety seven- year-old girl-child parades in her mother’s trousseau and mumbles a primrose Kleenex tissue to make sure her lipstick’s even. Gallogly has only to part the veil of its stomach wall to get right under the skin, the spluttering heart and collapsed lung, of the horse in Guernica. He flees the Museum of Modern Art with its bit between his teeth. When he began to cough blood, Hamsun rode the Minneapolis/ New York night train on top of the dining-car. One long, inward howl. A porter-drinker without a thrapple. A weekend trip to the mountains north of Boston with Alice, Alice A. and her paprika hair, the ignition key to her family’s Winnebago camper, her quim biting the leg off her. In the oyster bar of Grand Central Station she gobbles a dozen Chesapeakes— ‘Oh, I’m not particular as to size’— and, with a flourish of Tabasco, turns to gobble him. A brewery lorry on a routine delivery is taking a slow, dangerous bend. The driver’s blethering his code name over the Citizens Band when someone ambles in front of him. Go, Johnny, go, go, go. He’s been dry-gulched by a sixteen-year-old numb with Mogadon, whose face is masked by the seamless black stocking filched from his mum. When who should walk in but Beatrice, large as life, or larger, sipping her one glass of lager and singing her one song. If he had it to do all over again he would let her shave his head in memory of ’98 and her own, the French, Revolution. The son of the King of the Moy met this child on the Roxborough estate.Noblesse, she said.Noblesse oblige. And her tiny nipples were bruise-bluish, wild raspberries. The song she sang was ‘The Croppy Boy’. Her grand’mère was once asked to tea by Gertrude Stein, and her grand’mère and Gertrude and Alice B.,chère Alice B. with her hook-nose, the three of them sat in the nude round the petits fours and repeated Eros is Eros is Eros. If he had it to do all over again he would still be taken in by her Alice B. Toklas Nameless Cookies and those new words she had him learn: hash, hashish,lo perfido assassin. Once the local councillor straps himself into the safety belt of his Citroën and skids up the ramp from the municipal car park he upsets the delicate balance of a mercury-tilt boobytrap. Once they collect his smithereens he doesn’t quite add up. They’re shy of a foot, and a calf which stems from his left shoe like a severely pruned-back shrub. Ten years before. The smooth-as-a front-lawn at Queen’s where she squats before a psilocybin god. The indomitable gentle-bush that had Lanyon or Lynn revise their elegant ground plan for the university quad. With calmness, with care, with breast milk, with dew. There’s no cure now. There’s nothing left to do.

When I stood behind his desk chair and when he sat, on rare occasions, on the porch, “sage of Anacostia,” they called him, I smelled his mane glorious, and as a hand saddle the aroma of hair took me to neckline and below. In Egypt, long after Napoleon had shot off the face of the Sphinx, I thought of this man, and the cusp of his palms on my shoulder blades; as always he was carrying the mail of gender, his touch immaculate in the true blend of the cortex, and of the complex, risen on a pulpit, and after the hot air, wintry parlance, the syllables of my name in his ear, when he touched me, as he had touched me then. I had my suspicions of English ladies, actresses, ghosts of the Thames, concubines, as we had been into this next century. And they had their wiles with him. I do not feel forbidden; the cameo ring he gave me, recession of his maleness all I need, and highlights of my dark profile, any children we might have had buried in architecture, and the hate of his daughter Rosetta, who I have spoken to over the grate. The sun rises and sets in our neighborhood: I WILL BURN THESE. But when I place my fingers in that mane it is to the saddle he will come.

An inch from the curse and pearled by the evening heat       I shake my polo neck and a cool draught buffs my chest. What rises is my animal aroma             the scent of blue-ribbon stock      the sort a starred chef would ladle from a zinc-bottomed pan    to soften and savor the hock he has sawn and roasted for the diners out front who sip at shots of pastis and gnaw around the pits of kalamata olives. My head sits in his fridge: stooping for herb butter, our eyes meet and he touches my cotton-cold face      just as once I stroked your cheek in a dream you suffered in a room above the river.

Not less; only—different. Not everything should be visible. Wingdom: doves. Not everything can be. There are many parts to the body.The light, like I said. Gratia exempli, per person more than one heart. As, of hearts, more than one kind. As coin. As thrust. To begin counting is to understand what it can mean, to lose track. Is there nothing not useful? Anything left, anymore, private?Ambition, like they said: little torch; having meant to. Doom is always in style somewhere and, where it isn't, will come back. Bird in the bush, take me. Splendor: nothing priceless. To believe anything, to want anything—these, too, have cost you.Flame, and the beveled sword, set inside it. This one, this—what did you think body was? What did you mean when you said not everything should be said?The light as a tipped cone, searching. The body that breaks finally, routinely faltering before that.If a sword, then without patience; if as water–pearled, swift. What else could you have thought, when you thought love–having known the torch, having more than meant to.Just watch me. Not grand; only—distant.Weather, and the bleachable skull, set inside it. Locust-wind, small through-the-yellow-sycamore fingering wind, Carry me, let the prayer—valiant, up— go. Some bright and last thing should.

Sir star, Herr Lenz, white season body master snapping masts in half, absent winds’ workmanship: what window will I look you through, what brook, stream creaking past fretwork weeds, clouds in the context of cold? Lord knot to be untied, skiff hard alee ill winds: a hiss of wish and cinders and I am warm, crossing dazed oceans by hand to sow the doubtful sea with drought. Mine of rain and seize and sluice, you change your mind again, a rage for green waves’ open vowels, undrinkable. No talking to the weeds, no talking with the snow.

I whole in body, and in mind, but very weak in purse, Do make, and write my testament for fear it will be worse. And first I wholly do commend my soul and body eke, To God the Father and the Son, so long as I can speak. And after speech, my soul to him, and body to the grave, Till time that all shall rise again, their Judgement for to have, And then I hope they both shall meet, to dwell for aye in joy; Whereas I trust to see my friends released from all annoy. Thus have you heard touching my soul, and body what I mean: I trust you all will witness bear, I have a steadfast brain. O God, now let me dispose such things, as I shall leave behind, That those which shall receive the same, may know my willing mind. I first of all to London leave, because I there was bred, Brave buildings rare, of churches store, and Paul’s to the head. Between the same, fair treats there be, and people goodly store; Because their keeping craveth cost, I yet will leave him more. First for their food, I butchers leave, that every day shall kill; By Thames you shall have brewers’ store, and bakers at your will. And such as orders do observe, and eat fish thrice a week, I leave two streets, full fraught therewith, they need not far to seek. Watling Street, and Canwick Street, I full of woolen leave; And linen store in Friday Street, if they me not deceive. And those which are of calling such, that costlier they require, I mercers leave, with silk so rich, as any would desire. In Cheap of them, they store shall find, and likewise in that street, I goldsmiths leave, with jewels such, as are for ladies meet. * * * Now when the folk are fed and clad with such as I have named, For dainty mouths, and stomachs weak some junckets must be framed. Wherefore I potecaries leave, with banquets in their shop, Physicians also for the sick, Diseases for to stop. Some roysters still must bide in thee, and such as cut it out; That with the guiltless quarrel will, to let their blood about. For them I cunning surgeons leave, some plasters to apply, That ruffians may not still be hanged, nor quiet persons die. * * * To all the bookbinders by Paul’s, because I like their art, They every week shall money have, when they from books depart. Among them all, my printer must have somewhat to his share; I will my friends these books to buy of him, with other ware. For maidens poor, I widowers rich do leave, that oft shall dote: And by that means shall marry them, to set the girls afloat. And wealthy widows will I leave to help young gentlemen; Which when you have, in any case, be courteous to them then: And see their plate and jewels eke may not be marred with rust; Nor let their bags too long be full, for fear that they do burst. * * * And Bedlam must not be forgot, for that was oft my walk: I people there too many leave, that out of tune do talk. * * * At th’ Inns of Court, I lawyers leave to take their case in hand. And also leave I at each Inn of Court, or Chancery, Of gentlemen, a youthful roote, full of activity, For whom I store of books have left, at each bookbinder’s stall: And part of all that London hath, to furnish them withal. And when they are with study cloyed, to recreate their mind, Of tennis courts, of dancing schools, and fence they store shall find. And every Sunday at the least, I leave to make them sport, In divers places players, that of wonders shall report. Now, London, have I (for thy sake) within thee, and without, As comes into my memory, dispersèd ’round about Such needful things as they should have, here left now unto thee; When I am gone, with conscience, let them dispersèd be. And though I nothing namèd have, to bury me withal, Consider that above the ground, annoyance be I shall. And let me have a shrouding sheet to cover me from shame, And in oblivion bury me, and never more me name. Ringings nor other ceremonies use you not for cost, Nor at my burial, make no feast, your money were but lost. * * * This XX of October, I, in ANNO DOMINI, A thousand, v. hundred seventy-three, as almanacs descry, Did write this will with mine own hand, and it to London gave; In witness of the standers-by, whose names, if you will have, paper, pen and standish were, at that same present by, With Time, who promised to reveal so fast as she could buy The same, lest of my nearer kin for any thing should vary; So finally I make an end no longer can I tarry.