505 History and politics poems

I grew up in a village built on coal and labor. An outhouse on a dirt road by a water pump glared at the whitewashed fences of uniformed yards that gaped like broken teeth in the mouths of miners. All summer we played Cossacks and Bandits, shot our symbolic rifles and revolvers and when killed would crush a wild cherry in the breast pocket, the spot where the heart stopped. Who started it? The red spreading over white satin never to be washed away completely, “I killed you! I killed you!” I screamed as he fell down. Men found him three years later in the abandoned mine after an explosion, his clothes covered with coal dust and blood. Women howled like wolves. “It’s nothing, he’ll get up,” I thought, “it’s just that stupid wild cherry on his shirt.”

Christ God who savest man, save most Of men Count Gismond who saved me! Count Gauthier, when he chose his post, Chose time and place and company To suit it; when he struck at length My honour, 't was with all his strength. And doubtlessly, ere he could draw All points to one, he must have schemed! That miserable morning saw Few half so happy as I seemed, While being dressed in queen's array To give our tourney prize away. I thought they loved me, did me grace To please themselves; 't was all their deed; God makes, or fair or foul, our face; If showing mine so caused to bleed My cousins' hearts, they should have dropped A word, and straight the play had stopped. They, too, so beauteous! Each a queen By virtue of her brow and breast; Not needing to be crowned, I mean, As I do. E'en when I was dressed, Had either of them spoke, instead Of glancing sideways with still head! But no: they let me laugh, and sing My birthday song quite through, adjust The last rose in my garland, fling A last look on the mirror, trust My arms to each an arm of theirs, And so descend the castle-stairs- And come out on the morning troop Of merry friends who kissed my cheek, And called me queen, and made me stoop Under the canopy-(a streak That pierced it, of the outside sun, Powdered with gold its gloom's soft dun)- And they could let me take my state And foolish throne amid applause Of all come there to celebrate My queen's-day-Oh I think the cause Of much was, they forgot no crowd Makes up for parents in their shroud! However that be, all eyes were bent Upon me, when my cousins cast Theirs down; 't was time I should present The victor's crown, but ... there, 't will last No long time ... the old mist again Blinds me as then it did. How vain! See! Gismond's at the gate, in talk With his two boys: I can proceed. Well, at that moment, who should stalk Forth boldly-to my face, indeed- But Gauthier? and he thundered "Stay!" And all stayed. "Bring no crowns, I say! "Bring torches! Wind the penance-sheet "About her! Let her shun the chaste, "Or lay herself before their feet! "Shall she, whose body I embraced "A night long, queen it in the day? "For honour's sake no crowns, I say!" I? What I answered? As I live, I never fancied such a thing As answer possible to give. What says the body when they spring Some monstrous torture-engine's whole Strength on it? No more says the soul. Till out strode Gismond; then I knew That I was saved. I never met His face before, but, at first view, I felt quite sure that God had set Himself to Satan; would who spend A minute's mistrust on the end? He strode to Gauthier, in his throat Gave him the lie, then struck his mouth With one back-handed blow that wrote In blood men's verdict there. North, South, East, West, I looked. The lie was dead, And damned, and truth stood up instead. This glads me most, that I enjoyed The heart o' the joy, with my content In watching Gismond unalloyed By any doubt of the event: God took that on him-I was bid Watch Gismond for my part: I did. Did I not watch him while he let His armourer just brace his greaves, Rivet his hauberk, on the fret The while! His foot ... my memory leaves No least stamp out nor how anon He pulled his ringing gauntlets on. And e'en before the trumpet's sound Was finished, prone lay the false knight, Prone as his lie, upon the ground: Gismond flew at him, used no sleight O' the sword, but open-breasted drove, Cleaving till out the truth he clove. Which done, he dragged him to my feet And said, "Here die, but end thy breath "In full confession, lest thou fleet "From my first, to God's second death! "Say, hast thou lied? "And, "I have lied "To God and her,"he said, and died. Then Gismond, kneeling to me, asked -What safe my heart holds, though no word Could I repeat now, if I tasked My powers for ever, to a third Dear even as you are. Pass the rest Until I sank upon his breast. Over my head his arm he flung Against the world; and scarce I felt His sword (that dripped by me and swung) A little shifted in its belt: For he began to say the while How South our home lay many a mile. So, 'mid the shouting multitude We two walked forth to never more Return. My cousins have pursued Their life, untroubled as before I vexed them. Gauthier's dwelling-place God lighten! May his soul find grace! Our elder boy has got the clear Great brow, tho' when his brother's black Full eye shows scorn, it ... Gismond here? And have you brought my tercel back? I was just telling Adela How many birds it struck since May.

Harry Franck, from the United States of America - Census Enumerator I came to Panama planning to dig the Eighth Wonder of the World, but I was told that white men should never be seen working with shovels, so I took a police job, and now I've been transferred to the census. I roam the jungle, counting laborers who live in shanties and those who live on the run, fugitives who are too angry to keep working for silver in a system where they know that others earn gold. When islanders see me coming, they're afraid of trouble, even though I can't arrest them anymore—now all I need is a record of their names, ages, homelands, and colors. The rules of this census confound me. I'm expected to count white Jamaicans as dark and every shade of Spaniard as semi-white, so that Americans can pretend there's only one color in each country. How am I supposed to enumerate this kid with the Cuban accent? His skin is medium, but his eyes are green. And what about that Puerto Rican scientist, who speaks like a New York professor, or the girl who says she doesn't know where she was born or who her parents are—she could be part native, or part French, Jamaican, Chinese ... She could even be part American, from people who passed through here way back in gold rush days. Counting feels just as impossible as turning solid mountains into a ditch.

I . Sleep faster, my son says. He’s poking at my eyelids, pulling at the pillows, the helicopter hum of anticipation rising in his throat as I reach out and spin him onto the bed. I want to set my heels once more in the soft underbelly of his childhood, airlift him from danger, from disease, from all his fears, which are maybe not even his fears at all, but only mine. Yet now as he hovers above me, my body splayed out like my father’s before me, my every breath is less a prayer than a love letter torn open in desperation. II. Remember, I say, when we counted to six million, a visualization of tragedy, one half hour a day for two years, and that, for the tribe only; it would take another whole year for the gypsies, the Catholics, the gays, the foreigners, the Negroes, the artists, the philosophers, etc. You were barely six at the time, your mother wondering what the hell I was thinking, and even now I can’t fathom why I didn’t just hold you close— It would have taken only a moment— And say whatever it was that I really wanted to say. III. I’m watching Batman reruns when the telephone rings. Holy Charoset, I yell at the kitchen wall,call back later. Maybe I threw some raisins, I don’t remember. We’re already married, your mother and I, but at the time, don’t ask, I was living alone. And so I’m laughing, mostly from boredom, but still, laughing, while my father lay dying, gasping for breath in some dirty gutter, gunned down for a half-empty briefcase, a gefilte fish sandwich, and a New York Post which the next day would have his picture on the twenty-eighth page; one more dead Jew. IV. You burst into the room, fifth grade facts burning your tongue like Moses’ coal.100 people die every minute, you tell me as I turn down the TV; and then, gleefully:50 since I’ve been in this room, and now 75 and now . . . O my little census bureau, my prince of darkness, my prophet of numbers, riddle me this: how many grains of sand before you can call it a desert? And where were you the day Kennedy was shot? CNN, interrupting, asks. My grandmother clicks her tongue like she’s chopping onions in the old country . Poor boy, she says, pointing. And there’s John-John again, waving that little flag, still saluting. V. And who will remember my father when I am gone? And how many have died since his death? And what’s one more. or one less. And what do I know of my father’s father? I’m waiting outside, engine humming, as my son, eighteen, registers. And now he’s shouting, running towards me, arms pumping above his head. He’s Moses the moment before spying the golden calf. He’s his great grandfather crawling underground to freedom. He’s my father flying medical supplies, surviving the crash. My mother must have held him close.You’re home, she cries , safe. VI. Vietnam, I say, or Sarajevo.  Afghanistan, my son answers, or Iraq. My father would have said Germany. He could have said Japan. Nobody says anonymously. Nobody says Gotham. Korea, my cousin says, or Kosovo.  My great grandfather says South Africa. His great grandfather says Spain. Somebody says Egypt now; somebody, Egypt then. Nobody says suddenly. Nobody says Brooklyn. I’m counting myself to sleep, when my wife hears a sound at the door.Careful, she whispers. We’re alone, in an empty house; my every breath reminding me I’m older than my father, on the day of his death. VII. There are more people breathing this very moment, my son insists, than have ever died. He’s home from college, so I don’t double-check. He’s driven a long way to surprise me on my birthday. Are you sure you can’t stay, I ask, holding him close. He looks full of hope; a woman I’ve never seen before at his side. Welcome home, I tell my wife. She’s just turned twenty-four. I’m childless, fatherless. It’s the day of the funeral; Nineteen years until the twin towers. Three thousand since Moses murdered the overseer. But that’s not what I’m thinking.One,two, three, she says, guiding me inside. How could we not fall back in love?

15 September 1963, Birmingham Later he will say he did not do it, he was home at breakfast, just ask the wife, say they heard some radio preacher doing love thy neighbor while birds filled up the yard. Later, he will say he did not do it then tell how he didn't, lean in close to say if he would have done it it wouldn't have been alone, he would have had a driver and a man out west to phone in threats to draw the cops away. They'd ease through empty streets to plant their package then glide away, their route thick with friends, a thousand ways to disappear. • The DA will lean, will see his would have dashboard-lit, driving Dynamite Hill, headlights, radio dead. Would have in the shotgun seat, sticks sweating in his grip, shadow steering through the city's sleep. Will see them driving, out before the paperboys, ready to throw when the dark is right. See him Christmas, few years back, outside the preacher's house, thin fuse of cigarette, newspaper spread on the bus protests. See flash, shock push him from the dark, burn his shadow where anyone could see. Something dark in the lenses of the bottle trees. • The photographer spots him eyeing the bombed-out church, minutes after, a face he's seen before, flash on the shards of phone-booths and broken windows he'll follow through the horrid and the horrified while the cops arrive, the state patrol arrives with bayonets instead of hoses, bayonets instead of dogs, while congregants arrive between firemen and plainclothes Klansmen and the children, the children arrive and depart, and there, the smirk he'll follow through uniforms and Sunday black, into the park, then lose him as it fills. • Will stand in the blur of what arrives and wonder where he could have gone. Whether he'd cut toward the depot, through the railyards to wind back home, or north through the nervous blocks, or circle back for another view, maybe shadowed in a doorway, japing in a storefront window, listening at a sandwich stand while everyone is talking, his work on every tongue. Maybe he could drift through the crush of lookers in cigarette smoke, in the breath of many lungs, common, innocuous, a cloud about to disappear. • Will stand imagining him split at each intersection, now four of him working the city's riot, one with a bomb in his Sunday Herald, one with a gun hung out the window racing to a segregation rally, one with a bullhorn and a speech for the news if they want it right, and one just waiting for some midnight's cool when he can stand beneath the vacant windows and search for that fire in the face of Christ before driving out past the mills. On the ridge he'll see Vulcan's torch is red, but not for them. Shadows reel from the furnace sheds, birds exploding, blown from molten light. • The mayor says all of us are victims, innocent victims. The lawyer kills his radio. When folks ask later who did it, the lawyer says I'll tell you who. Who is everyone who talks of niggers. Who is everyone who slurs to his neighbors and his sons. Everyone who jokes about niggers and everyone who laughs at the jokes. Everyone who's quiet, who lets it happen. Now his voice flaps in the rafters of the meeting hall, and everyone is quiet. I'll tell you who did it, he says. We all did. • The photographer keeps his beat, past the crater in the church foundation, through the park, into the midday rush, just where he lost him. In the darkroom, he kept arriving, his face framed between elbows, caught in the thrall, or his crewcut, his smile cropped by arms. Now his haircut, half-rolled sleeve, cigarette lip, his eye pass by a dozen times, and more. He could be anyone, could be everyone wandering the storefronts, spying behind his News. The photographer follows each one, cocked and ready to shoot, but his lens can't catch them all so he just stands, tracing their paths, he just stands, lost in the crowd he becomes.

We are so honored that you are here, they said. We know that this is your homeland, they said. The admission price is five dollars, they said. Here is your button for the event, they said. It means so much to us that you are here, they said. We want to write an apology letter, they said. Tell us what to say.

He started with the tune his mother had hummed in Ohio, nostalgia he’d carried for years, and by Sunday afternoon he had the words. A triumph, already; he whistled the banjo’s part. (Himself a sympathizer from the North, called copperhead, called traitor by his own kin.) Something lively, some git-up-and-git they’d wanted and didn’t he deliver— Miss Susan got seven encores the first night. That gave them their tune, their Negro walk-around— Look away, look away, look away, they sang. Vipers, that spring, spread thick on the ground.

“History always dresses us for the wrong occasions.” —Ricardo Pau-Llosa Camera Obscura The afternoon lightening his shadow, Fidel descends from the mountains, the clean-shaven lawyer turned guerilla, his eyes focused on infinity, El Jefe Máximo con sus Barbudos, rebels with rosary beads on their 600-mile procession across the island with campesinos on horseback, flatbed trucks, tanks, a new year’s journey down the oldest roads towards betrayal. Ambient light. Available light Light inside of them, nameless isleños line El Malecón to touch Fidel, already defining himself in black and white. The dramatic sky moving in for the close-up that will frame his all-night oratory, he turns to the crowd, variations on an enigma, waving from his pulpit with rehearsed eloquence, a dove on his shoulder. This is a photograph. This is not a sign. Flash-on camera. Celebrity portraits. 1.     Fidel on a balcony across the street from Grand Central Station, an American flag above his head, New York, 1959. 2.     Fidel made small by the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C., 1959. 3.     Fidel learning to ski, a minor black ball against a white landscape, Russia, 1962. 4.     Fidel and shotgun, hunting with Nikita, Russia, 1962. Circles of Confusion Beyond photographs, Havana is looted and burned. Women weep at out wailing wall, El Paredón, where traitors are taken, and television cameras shoot the executions, this blood soup, the paradoxes of our lives, three years before I am born. Photoflood But it is late afternoon, and a shower of confetti and serpentine falls from every floor of the Havana Hilton, where history is a giant piñata, where at midnight, Fidel will be photographed eating a ham sandwich.

There were scruffy local prophets just beyond cannon-range in every hamlet. Door-Hinge Guillem, say, in Lebanon, OH — gets no respect — or Josh the Carpenter, for example, out on a limb in Galilee, RI. Him they tend to snub, until winter cracks the mast off the yacht,& the tub starts to founder petrified in flounder- nets (Ocean’s cold reprimand). Time gets old, echoes grow faint; the statue in the park steps into evening dark, amnesia puts on war-paint. Your icon, buried in the garden sank like a thousand ships into the grass. Those lips still graze my ear, sheep-warden — whispering forgotten words out of a lichen-book. Words of the sea. Look, their wave-trace in the woods — a cedar replica. Her milky kingdom was a salt-spray splinter, Noah’s rudder-stump — her shuddering Shaker-wheel spelled freedom.

All male Quincys are now dead, excepting one. John Wheelwright, “Gestures to the Dead” 1 Vast oblong space dwindled to one solitary rock. On it I saw a heap of hay impressed with the form of a man. Beleaguered Captain Stork with his cane on some quixotic skirmish. Deserters arrived from Fort Necessity All hope was gone. Howe carrying a white flag of truce went toward the water. 2 An Apostle in white stood on a pavement of scarlet Around him stretched in deep sleep lay the dark forms of warriors. He was turned away gazing on a wide waste. His cry of alarm astonished everyone. 3 A Council of War in battle array after some siege. I ran to them shouting as I ran “Victory!” Night closed in weedy with flies. The Moon slid between moaning pines and tangled vines. 4 Neutrals collected bones or journeyed behind on foot shouting at invisible doors to open. There were guards who approached stealthy as linxes Always fresh footprints in the forest We closed a chasm then trod the ground firm I carried your name like a huge shield. 5 Because dreams were oracles agile as wild-cats we leapt on a raft of ice. Children began a wail of despair we carried them on our shoulders. A wave thrust our raft of ice against a northern shore. An Indian trail led through wood and thicket Light broke on the forest The hostile town was close at hand. We screamed our war-cry and rushed in. 6 It was Him Power of the Clouds Judge of the Dead The sheep on his right The goats on his left And all the angels. But from the book backward on their knees crawled neolithic adventurers known only to themselves. They blazed with artifice no pin, or kernel, or grain too small to pick up. A baby with a broken face lay on the leaves Hannibal—a rough looking man rushed by with a bundle of sticks. “Ah, this is fortunate,” cried Forebear and helped himself to me. 7 God is an animal figure Clearly headless. He bewitches his quarry with ambiguous wounds The wolf or poor ass had only stolen straw. O sullen Silence Nail two sticks together and tell resurrection stories. 8 There on the deck, child in her arms was the girl I had been before She waved then threw her child to me and jumped But she missed the edge and swirled away. I left you in a group of grownup children and went in search wandered sandhills snowy nights calling “Mother, Father” A Dauphin sat down to dine on dust alone in his field of wheat One war-whoop toppled a State. I thought we were in the right country but the mountains were gone. We saw five or six people coming toward us who were savages. Alhough my pen was leaky as a sieve I scribbled “Arm, Arm!” “Ear.” Barked the Moon. We paddled with hands, planks, and a pencil “Listen—The people surrender” I don’t remember the rest but it was beautiful. We were led ashore by Captain Snow “I’ll meet you soon—” he said and vanished in the fog. 9 We cooked trout and perch on forked sticks. Fire crackled in the forest stillness Fire forms stood out against the gloom Ancient trunks with wens and deformities Moss bearded ancients—and thin saplings The strong, the weak, the old, the young— Now and then some sleeper would get up Warm her hands at the fire and listen to the whisper of a leaf or the footfall of an animal I kept my gun-match burning when it rained— 10 Holding hands with my skin I walked the wintry strand. “Tickle yourself with my stroke” ticked the wiseacre clock. The river sang— “Pelucid dark and deep my waters— come and cross me alone.” The final ruins ahead revealed two figures timidly engraved on one another. 11 I built a house that faced the east I never ventured west for fear of murder. Eternity dawned. Solitary watcher of what rose and set I saw only a Golgotha of corpses. 12 Experience teaches the savage revenge an enemy always takes on forerunners who follow. You were a little army of unarmed children— A newborn infant sat in the hollow of my pillow. 13 The house was a model of harmony. Children coiled like hedgehogs or lay on their backs. A doll uttered mysterious oracles “Put on the kettle.” “Get up and go home.” The clock was alive I asked what it ate. “A Cross large enough to crucify us all.” and so on. Blankets congealed into icicles We practiced trips, falls, dives into snowdrifts. With a snowshoe for a shovel I opened the clock and we searched for peace in its deep and private present. Outside, the world swarmed with sorcerers.