506 History and politics poems

—for Paul Metcalf A linear projection: a route. It crosses The ocean in many ships. Arriving in the new Land, it cuts through and down forests and it Keeps moving. Terrain: Rock, weaponry. Dark trees, mastery. Grass, to yield. Earth, Reproachful. Fox, bear, coon, wildcat Prowl gloomily, it kills them, it skins them, Its language alters, no account varmint, its Teeth set, nothing defeats its obsession, it becomes A snake in the reedy river. Spits and prays, Keeps moving. Behind it, a steel track. Cold, Permanent. Not permanent. It will decay. This Does not matter, it does not actually care, Murdering the buffalo, driving the laggard regiments, The caring was a necessary myth, an eagle like A speck in heaven dives. The line believes That the entire wrinkled mountain range is the Eagle’s nest, and everything tumbles in place. It buries its balls at Wounded Knee, it rushes Gold, it gambles. It buys plastics. Another Ocean stops it. Soon, soon, up by its roots, Severed, irrecoverably torn, that does not matter, It decides, perpendicular from here: escape. A prior circle: a mouth. It is nowhere, Everywhere, swollen, warm. Expanding and contracting It absorbs and projects children, jungles, Black shoes, pennies, blood. It speaks Too many dark, suffering languages. Reaching a hand Toward its throat, you disappear entirely. No Wonder you fear this bleeding pulse, no wonder.

Where the correlative of reason was conviction and where the correlative of power was obedience, the correlative of authority was trust Your job—she gives another to the child hip-high—is to heat the money in your hands to the optimum warmth for purchase. Cagey, the diversion in the same coin as his want. It buys her time, enough that once they round the corner, she might break into a sprint, as one might with a pet who can keep up. But the prophet makes eyes in his open fists of the nickels’ glint, and we see he forbears our guess her hector gets lost in the flash when as if by swale we all give way to expel a customer from the clench of us without her. For what beneath the moths who have all night to live do we brace ourselves as we approach? We lean to find again the boy’s outguess of us. Demand is double at the walk-up window, where punishment for paltry want is to tell it again into plexiglass the color of slobber, so others in the bleach of halogen light may deal their disparagement forward. For what if not dishonor are we braced, rehearsing what to ask? Repetition is a machine, a machine for converting request into appeal; and commerce, then, the window’s byproduct or balm, depending. Red hot cashews, yellow bag. Only because we visit by day do we know at night what to call at the walk-up window where two aisles of open merchandise end at the sacral plates of clerks before us who, if on pulleys they were carts instead or vending claws, would be by now concussed and dented by lever malevolence outright. The prophet stands eye level with the vending plunge, a here and now mechanism he would need to invent to operate, and stands between it and his mother. Yellow bag. Because there is not enough money in the world, people steal;...                                                           because there is not enough recognition, they make art

In this poem there is no suffering. It spans hundreds of years and records no deaths, connecting when it can, those moments where people are healthy and happy, content to be alive. A Chapter, maybe a Volume, shorn of violence consists of an adult reading aimlessly. This line is the length of a full life smuggled in while no one was plotting against a neighbour, except in jest. Then, after a gap, comes Nellie. She is in a drought-fisted field with a hoe. This is her twelfth year on the land, and today her back doesn’t hurt. Catechisms of self-pity and of murder have declared a day’s truce in the Civil War within her. So today, we can bring Nellie, content with herself, with the world, into our History. For a day. In the next generation we find a suitable subject camping near the border of a divided country: for a while no one knows how near. For these few lines she is ours. But how about the lovers? you ask, the freshly-washed body close to yours; sounds, smells, tastes; anticipation of the young, the edited memory of the rest of us? How about thoughts higher than their thinkers?...Yes, yes. Give them half a line and a mass of footnotes: they have their own privileged history, like inherited income beside our husbandry. We bring our History up to date in a city like London: someone’s just paid the mortgage, is free of guilt and not dying of cancer; and going past the news-stand, doesn’t see a headline advertising torture. This is all recommended reading, but in small doses. It shows you can avoid suffering, if you try.

In post—World War II America there were several loosely affiliated, overlapping strands of poets who began publishing—poets rejecting the epistemological and anglophile models of W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot. They were known variously as the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beats, and the Black Mountain poets. They came up on the heels of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, and along the spur of the Objectivists, aka Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Niedecker, et al. Robert Creeley was the bridge. He distributed the differences and sounded parallel concerns. He began corresponding with Pound and Williams in 1949. He and John Ashbery were seated two desks apart at Harvard. In Majorca, his Divers Press published Robert Duncan and Paul Blackburn. He typed Allen Ginsberg's Howl, which was then mimeographed in an edition of twenty-five. At the now legendary and gone Black Mountain College, he studied with Charles Olson and "earned" his successorship. At Black Mountain Creeley edited the Black Mountain Review(initially from Majorca) and picked up the degree he had managed not to complete at Harvard. Over the years he would edit works of Charles Olson and George Oppen (and Robert Burns and Walt Whitman), as well as anthologies of new American writing. His correspondence was carried on at a rate and level not to be believed. The Olson/Creeley letters alone consume ten volumes (if e-mail had been available to those two the number of volumes might have been squared). He wrote tense stories and a superb short novel along with scores of word-perfect essays. Overall he published in the vicinity of seventy books. Checking a familiar book site, 227 titles are instantly identified with his name. His collaborations with artists including Francesco Clemente, Elsa Dorfman, Sol LeWitt, R.B. Kitaj, and Susan Rothenberg were the occasion of fine-edition books and traveling exhibitions. His collaborations with musicians such as Steve Lacy and Steve Swallow were performed for packed, hip audiences and are featured on numerous recordings. He could and did fill Albert Hall, but he had no qualms about reading to a crowd of four. No qualms, either, about talking extemporaneously in lieu of giving the promoted reading. He was not there to accommodate anyone's prepackaged expectations—he was there to discover the direction of his own thinking. And in that lies, as he often quoted William Carlos Williams, the profundity.

William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk: beheaded 1450 John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester: beheaded 1470 Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers: beheaded 1483 1 Processionals in the exemplary cave, Benediction of shadows. Pomfret. London. The voice fragrant with mannered humility, With an equable contempt for this world, ‘In honorem Trinitatis’. Crash. The head Struck down into a meaty conduit of blood. So these dispose themselves to receive each Pentecostal blow from axe or seraph, Spattering block-straw with mortal residue. Psalteries whine through the empyrean. Fire Flares in the pit, ghosting upon stone Creatures of such rampant state, vacuous Ceremony of possession, restless Habitation, no man’s dwelling-place. 2 For whom do we scrape our tribute of pain— For none but the ritual king? We meditate A rueful mystery; we are dying To satisfy fat Caritas, those Wiped jaws of stone. (Suppose all reconciled By silent music; imagine the future Flashed back at us, like steel against sun, Ultimate recompense.) Recall the cold Of Towton on Palm Sunday before dawn, Wakefield, Tewkesbury: fastidious trumpets Shrilling into the ruck; some trampled Acres, parched, sodden or blanched by sleet, Stuck with strange-postured dead. Recall the wind’s Flurrying, darkness over the human mire. 3 They bespoke doomsday and they meant it by God, their curved metal rimming the low ridge. But few appearances are like this. Once Every five hundred years a comet’s Over-riding stillness might reveal men In such array, livid and featureless, With England crouched beastwise beneath it all. ‘Oh, that old northern business …’ A field After battle utters its own sound Which is like nothing on earth, but is earth. Blindly the questing snail, vulnerable Mole emerge, blindly we lie down, blindly Among carnage the most delicate souls Tup in their marriage-blood, gasping ‘Jesus’. 4 Let mind be more precious than soul; it will not Endure. Soul grasps its price, begs its own peace, Settles with tears and sweat, is possibly Indestructible. That I can believe. Though I would scorn the mere instinct of faith, Expediency of assent, if I dared, What I dare not is a waste history Or void rule. Averroes, old heathen, If only you had been right, if Intellect Itself were absolute law, sufficient grace, Our lives could be a myth of captivity Which we might enter: an unpeopled region Of ever new-fallen snow, a palace blazing With perpetual silence as with torches. 5 As with torches we go, at wild Christmas, When we revel in our atonement Through thirty feasts of unction and slaughter, What is that but the soul’s winter sleep? So many things rest under consummate Justice as though trumpets purified law, Spikenard were the real essence of remorse. The sky gathers up darkness. When we chant ‘Ora, ora pro nobis’ it is not Seraphs who descend to pity but ourselves. Those righteously-accused those vengeful Racked on articulate looms indulge us With lingering shows of pain, a flagrant Tenderness of the damned for their own flesh: 6 My little son, when you could command marvels Without mercy, outstare the wearisome Dragon of sleep, I rejoiced above all— A stranger well-received in your kingdom. On those pristine fields I saw humankind As it was named by the Father; fabulous Beasts rearing in stillness to be blessed. The world’s real cries reached there, turbulence From remote storms, rumour of solitudes, A composed mystery. And so it ends. Some parch for what they were; others are made Blind to all but one vision, their necessity To be reconciled. I believe in my Abandonment, since it is what I have. 7 ‘Prowess, vanity, mutual regard, It seemed I stared at them, they at me. That was the gorgon’s true and mortal gaze: Averted conscience turned against itself.’ A hawk and a hawk-shadow. ‘At noon, As the armies met, each mirrored the other; Neither was outshone. So they flashed and vanished And all that survived them was the stark ground Of this pain. I made no sound, but once I stiffened as though a remote cry Had heralded my name. It was nothing …’ Reddish ice tinged the reeds; dislodged, a few Feathers drifted across; carrion birds Strutted upon the armour of the dead. 8 Not as we are but as we must appear, Contractual ghosts of pity; not as we Desire life but as they would have us live, Set apart in timeless colloquy. So it is required; so we bear witness, Despite ourselves, to what is beyond us, Each distant sphere of harmony forever Poised, unanswerable. If it is without Consequence when we vaunt and suffer, or If it is not, all echoes are the same In such eternity. Then tell me, love, How that should comfort us—or anyone Dragged half-unnerved out of this worldly place, Crying to the end ‘I have not finished’.

The generalissimo’s glands directed him to and fro.Geronimo! said the über-goon we called God, and we were off to the races. Never mind that we could only grow gray things, that inspecting the horses’ gums in the gymnasium predicted a jagged road ahead. We were tired of hard news— it helped to turn down our hearing aids. We could already all do impeccable imitations of the idiot, his insistent incisors working on a steak as he said there’s an intimacy to invasion. That much was true. When we got jaded about joyrides, we could always play games in the kitchen garden with the prisoners. Jump the Gun, Fine Kettle of Fish and Kick the Kidney were our favorites. The laws the linguists thought up were particularly lissome, full of magical loopholes that spit out medals. We had made the big time, but night still nipped at our heels. The navigator’s needle swung strangely, oscillating between the oilwells and ask again later. We tried to pull ourselves together by practicing quarterback sneaks along the pylons, but the race to the ravine was starting to feel as real as the R.I.P.’s and roses carved into rock. Suddenly the sight of a schoolbag could send us scrambling.

If there were gamebirds in our gables, shouldn’t we shoot them ourselves? Thus we went glass-faced into glory. We had our hearts set on staying here, so our steps seemed more hesitation waltz than straight-ahead tango. We danced the hokey pokey on holy days— put your left arm in heaven, your right leg in hell and in the hubbub of shake-it-all-about, we didn’t hear the hoofbeats. The illuminati spoke to us over the intercom via interpreters. Meanwhile we had iodine dribbling from our wounds and itch mites in our blankets. Ours was not a job to joke about. In the lantern-light, the lawn speckled with lead looked lovely. We would live this down by living it up. My pile of looseleaf was getting smaller—I wrote in margins, through marmalade stains, on the backs of maps. I put a piece of mica in the microwave and before the explosion it made the mirage I’d imagined. I was hoping for a noticeable increase in nutmeats or a one night stand in the oubliette. I outwept everyone at the pageant, even the children from the poorhouse playing possum. We studied the protocol for astronaut removal the minute we saw his spit hit planet earth on the spaceship window. But though the scandal reverberated round-the-clock, we had to let it slide. He was up there turning somersaults while we spun ever-so-slowly below.

(Detroit, 1950) Because the jobs were there and a man could get rich working on the line, the South retreated North to Michigan, whole families eating crackers and baloney by the side of the road, changing drivers to keep moving through corn fields and foreign towns, sundown and darkness, the moon a prophecy of chrome, the stars 10 million headlights of the cars they would build. Ahead lay a city bright with steel; behind, the dark fields folded over everything they knew; and when they dozed on cramped back seats, they dreamed such dreams as the road can make, of drifting on a lake or stream or lying down in hay to dream of traveling, so that when they woke to a bump, a couch, a voice saying, “It’s your turn,” they were lost to themselves and took a few moments to remember their names. Mostly behind their backs, the locals called them rednecks, crackers, goddamned rebs. Strange to be strange, in their new neighborhoods, to be ethnic with a thick accent and a taste for food the grocers didn’t stock— hog jowl and blackeyes, turnip greens, roasting ears, souse-meat— the butcher shrugging, the produce man shaking his head. Sometimes their own voices took them by surprise, sounding odd and out of place in the din of a city bus, ringing lost in the evening air when they called their children in for supper. At work they touched parts of tomorrow, next year’s models always taking shape and vanishing, the present obsolete, the past merely a rumor, all hours blurring into one continuous moment of finishing a fragment, each piece the same piece, movements identical, endless, like a punishment in hell. No way out but back to their old lives, a future they already knew by heart, a few on the road each month in cars they may have helped assemble, tokens of their failed success, legacies for boys to find years later rusting on some lot, banged up but still a dream and fast enough when overhauled to make them feel they could blast straight into tomorrow, as they raced their engines at each stoplight and cruised their towns in circles.

You were my gym buddy ferreting along spotty florescent ramps. Misbegotten signals blinked out bumpkin lanes over sable grass. We passed through many things. Peach sirens, entryway orderlies. Mangled disposition-stations. Chief in disbelief was concrete love. Firmer still, a melee awkwardness that showed all registrants just how we managed to pickpocket night. Then came dark crowds. Some doodled for the pad, debriefed what pumiced eyes meant in multi-dotted foreign rows. Buildings like a spider’s clothes. Later, we sped backward. A maw orchard, windless in the mind, boomed electronic lifts. I spied you at the prow of some sensation. I declined to call another name. Pelting noise flew off fairy citadels. Clocks, first thought abducted, were switched. Dialogues dispelled. My love heard a mug crash on the countertop of Long Island Sound. Our people became as ones lost. Not many rebounded with pledge, not many fetched familiars, stretched legs, reread white meetings. O stream, ring your ears. Handsome tubers, go ahead and wig out. Modern territories click like a mouse. Body becomes human body. On a skinny avenue I hushed up pyramidal steps older than sorcery. You know how I want to share a dust ball with misty partner. Dance one fabled evening and hear the skylark do something. Picnics bended over, they happen below. Swings parks rung. I inject chlorine into my memory-parts with lady satisfaction. Are you gay? A political campaign sanctioned a quart of moose. So stars soon quarreled back to the travel section of the North. I ignored that and opened my lips for a job to crunch and push at me, seeing the flat spacey wherewithal of disconnected items. I want a second act. What can I say but this was my second act. Must wrangle a look-see. The sign revenging its timely laziness in the ruffled strut of an accusing pillow. I hibernate in phrase as perfect as the mood of the blue lotus flower. Public aspects. The last shipment of vhs tapes left its factory on this day in 2008 or 2009. Meanwhile, delis around town don’t go like they used to. Who cares if I can’t hose you down my you, my Newfoundland. And George Washington, someone we can’t really know, rows over famed waters, wondering what his face will be, not in the future, not for the monthly book clubs. But as sovereign: as beast with dunce cap. I will dress you down in fresh lettuce and gobble your ear off with smutty keys principled as music. The marching saints won’t bother in battalion to much know. We make of him so much hackneyed affection, dress wounds as if equivocal all need. Hunger passes through to the other side. Entertaining pals you wouldn’t call but couldn’t not think to. A disfigured face’s humiliated psychic debris sprawls on gussy rug. It talks you into needing solace while cup passes from sleep to sleep. The positional plot warps but is the same. The deluxe mattress drifts on gravitational subtleties like the rest of us, practicing the gut’s banjo. No, in fact, I don’t know how he ever crossed the channels or canals from that stout city. I don’t really know if I ever really need to know. One thing we share is worshipping the image of a person we never knew.

I wonder what I would have said if my dad asked me, "Son, do you know who cut down my pretty cherry tree?" I think I might have closed my eyes and thought a little bit about the herds of elephants I'd seen attacking it. I would have heard the rat-a-tat of woodpeckers, at least, or the raging roar of a charging boar or some such other beast! Perhaps a hippopotamus with nothing else to do had wandered through our garden and stopped to take a chew. We all know George said, "Father, I cannot tell a lie." Yet I can't help but wonder ... Did he really try?