506 History and politics poems

—for James I. Ina 1. The emotion of trucks, buses & troop trains brings them here, to the wrong side of another state. A woman at the Klamath Falls depot calls it the wrong side of the ocean. 2 Crumbs hide around the table legs in the mess hall, dishes & silverware clink a strange song. Families talk across long tables. Questions drop like puzzles to the unfinished floor. 3 Blocks away from their new home a woman finds a latrine not backed up. Stands in line, waiting her turn in the wind. Down the center of the open room: 12 toilet stools, six pair, back to back. Sits down and asks for privacy, holding a towel in front of her with trembling hands. 4 In a North Dakota prisoner-of-war camp, surrounded by Germans & Italians, a quiet man hammers a samurai sword from scrap metal at night in a boiler room. A secret edge to hold against the dark mornings. He sends love notes to his pregnant wife in Tule Lake sewn in pants mailed home for mending. His censored letters mention a torn pocket. She finds the paper near the rip, folded & secret in the lining. White voices claim the other side of the ocean is so crowded the people want to find death across the phantom river. Headlines shake their nervous words. Out on the coast beach birds print their calligraphy in the sand. It is such a small country.

Note who’s got to go today, don’t fuss about the means, just go ahead behead, impale, starve, strappado, the sheer assortment of choices enough to make a crown crow. They never loved me enough. It must be said: They were a disappointment. When divine mother love wears out, I just reverse the robe from blue to red. I like a flat ground to build the next town, city, empire of disgust. All the waste you see, that’s what I did, none of that happened to me. I did that. I made that. I killed that. I.

As naught gives way to aught and oxhide gives way to chain mail and byrnie gives way to battle-ax and Cavalier gives way to Roundhead and Cromwell Road gives way to the Connaught and I Am Curious (Yellow) gives way to I Am Curious (Blue) and barrelhouse gives way to Frank’N’Stein and a pint of Shelley plain to a pint of India Pale Ale I give way to you. As bass gives way to baritone and hammock gives way to hummock and Hoboken gives way to Hackensack and bread gives way to reed bed and bald eagle gives way to Theobald Wolfe Tone and the Undertones give way to Siouxsie Sioux and DeLorean, John, gives way to Deloria, Vine, and Pierced Nose to Big Stomach I give way to you. As vent gives way to Ventry and the King of the World gives way to Finn MacCool and phone gives way to fax and send gives way to sned and Dagenham gives way to Coventry and Covenanter gives way to caribou and the caribou gives way to the carbine and Boulud’s cackamamie to the cock-a-leekie of Boole I give way to you. As transhumance gives way to trance and shaman gives way to Santa and butcher’s string gives way to vacuum pack and the ineffable gives way to the unsaid and pyx gives way to monstrance and treasure aisle gives way to need-blind pew and Calvin gives way to Calvin Klein and Town and Country Mice to Hanta I give way to you. As Hopi gives way to Navaho and rug gives way to rag and Pax Vobiscum gives way to Tampax and Tampa gives way to the water bed and The Water Babies gives way to Worstward Ho and crapper gives way to loo and spruce gives way to pine and the carpet of pine needles to the carpetbag I give way to you. As gombeen-man gives way to not-for-profit and soft soap gives way to Lynn C. Doyle and tick gives way to tack and Balaam’s Ass gives way to Mister Ed and Songs of Innocence gives way to The Prophet and single-prop Bar-B-Q gives way to twin-screw and the Salt Lick gives way to the County Line and “Mending Wall” gives way to “Build Soil” I give way to you. As your hummus gives way to your foul madams and your coy mistress gives way to “The Flea” and flax gives way to W. D. Flackes and the living give way to the dead and John Hume gives way to Gerry Adams and Television gives way to U2 and Lake Constance gives way to the Rhine and the Rhine to the Zuider Zee I give way to you. As dutch treat gives way to french leave and spanish fly gives way to Viagra and slick gives way to slack and the local fuzz give way to the Feds and Machiavelli gives way to make-believe and Howards End gives way to A Room with a View and Wordsworth gives way to “Woodbine Willie” and stereo Nagra to quad Niagara I give way to you. As cathedral gives way to cavern and cookie cutter gives way to cookie and the rookies give way to the All-Blacks and the shad give way to the smoke shed and the roughshod give way to the Black Horse avern that still rings true despite that T being missing from its sign where a little nook gives way to a little nookie when I give way to you. That Nanook of the North should give way to Man of Aran as ling gives way to cod and cod gives way to kayak and Camp Moosilauke gives way to Club Med and catamite gives way to catamaran and catamaran to aluminum canoe is symptomatic of a more general decline whereby a cloud succumbs to a clod and I give way to you. For as Monet gives way to Juan Gris and Juan Gris gives way to Joan Miró and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer gives way to Miramax and the Volta gives way to Travolta, swinging the red-hot lead, and Saturday Night Fever gives way to Grease and the Greeks give way to you know who and the Roman IX gives way to the Arabic 9 and nine gives way, as ever, to zero I give way to you.

Ashglory behind your shaken-knotted hands at the threeway. Pontic erstwhile: here, a drop, on the drowned rudder blade, deep in the petrified oath, it roars up. (On the vertical breathrope, in those days, higher than above, between two painknots, while the glossy Tatarmoon climbed up to us, I dug myself into you and into you.) Ash- glory behind you threeway hands. The cast-in-front-of-you, from the East, terrible. No one bears witness for the witness.

God prosper long our noble Queen, And long may she reign! Maclean he tried to shoot her, But it was all in vain. For God He turned the ball aside Maclean aimed at her head; And he felt very angry Because he didn’t shoot her dead. There’s a divinity that hedges a king, And so it does seem, And my opinion is, it has hedged Our most gracious Queen. Maclean must be a madman, Which is obvious to be seen, Or else he wouldn’t have tried to shoot Our most beloved Queen. Victoria is a good Queen, Which all her subjects know, And for that God has protected her From all her deadly foes. She is noble and generous, Her subjects must confess; There hasn’t been her equal Since the days of good Queen Bess. Long may she be spared to roam Among the bonnie Highland floral, And spend many a happy day In the palace of Balmoral. Because she is very kind To the old women there, And allows them bread, tea, and sugar, And each one to get a share. And when they know of her coming, Their hearts feel overjoy’d, Because, in general, she finds work For men that’s unemploy’d. And she also gives the gipsies money While at Balmoral, I’ve been told, And, mind ye, seldom silver, But very often gold. I hope God will protect her By night and by day, At home and abroad, When she’s far away. May He be as a hedge around her, As He’s been all along, And let her live and die in peace Is the end of my song.

Look, we have made a counterpoint of white chrysanthemums, a dauntless path of death-will-not-part-us petals and revering light; even here, even here before the once-wolfish ovens, the desecrating wall where you were shot, the shrike-stern cells where you were bruised and emptied of your time-bound beauty— you of the confiscated shoes and swift-shorn hair, you who left, as sobering testament, the scuffed luggage of utter hope and harrowing deception. Come back, teach us. From these fearsome barracks and inglorious fields flecked with human ash, in the russet-billowing hours of All Hallows, let the pianissimo of your truest whispering (vivid as the crunched frost of a forced march) become a slowly blossoming, ever-voluble hearth revealing to us (the baffled, the irresolute, the war torn, the living) more of the fire and attar of what it means to be human.

That's how it was then, a knife through cartilage, a body broken. Animal and animal as mineral ash. A window smashed. The collective howl as a general alarm followed by quiet. Boot-black night, halogen hum. Tape snaking through a stealth machine. Later, shattered glass and a checkpoint charm—the clasp of a tourist-trap bracelet. An arm. A trinket. Snap goes the clamshell. The film in the braincase preserving the sense of the drench, the angle of the leash, the connecting collar. A tracking long-shot. The descent of small-town darkness.

The gaunt thing with no organs creeps along the streets of Europe, she will commute, in her feathered bat stomach-gown with no organs with sores on her insides even her head a vast puschamber of pus(sy) memories with no organs nothing to make babies she will be the great witch of euro-american legend who sucked the life from some unknown nigger whose name will be known but whose substance will not ever not even by him who is dead in a pile of dopeskin This bitch killed a friend of mine named Bob Thompson a black painter, a giant, once, she reduced to a pitiful imitation faggot full of American holes and a monkey on his back slapped airplanes from the empire state building May this bitch and her sisters, all of them, receive my words in all their orifices like lye mixed with cocola and alaga syrup feel this shit, bitches, feel it, now laugh your hysterectic laughs while your flesh burns and your eyes peel to red mud

The summer of nineteen eighteen I read The Jungle and The Research Magnificent. That fall My father died and my aunt Took me to Chicago to live. The first thing I did was to take A streetcar to the stockyards. In the winter afternoon, Gritty and fetid, I walked Through the filthy snow, through the Squalid streets, looking shyly Into the people’s faces, Those who were home in the daytime. Debauched and exhausted faces, Starved and looted brains, faces Like the faces in the senile And insane wards of charity Hospitals. Predatory Faces of little children. Then as the soiled twilight darkened, Under the green gas lamps, and the Sputtering purple arc lamps, The faces of the men coming Home from work, some still alive with The last pulse of hope or courage, Some sly and bitter, some smart and Silly, most of them already Broken and empty, no life, Only blinding tiredness, worse Than any tired animal. The sour smells of a thousand Suppers of fried potatoes and Fried cabbage bled into the street. I was giddy and sick, and out Of my misery I felt rising A terrible anger and out Of the anger, an absolute vow. Today the evil is clean And prosperous, but it is Everywhere, you don’t have to Take a streetcar to find it, And it is the same evil. And the misery, and the Anger, and the vow are the same.

Oh, for corniced palace of Baghdad! not the palatial cornices of Sindád al-Híra— It crowns the gardens cascading below, a virgin unveiled in a perfumed chamber. Wind plays in the branches. They bend. Lovers at last coming together. Her neck necklaced by the river Tigris, her lord our master our Imám al-Hádi, Násir, Mansúr, best of caliphs, who never set out on horseback to war. God bless him long as a dove on a swaying bough's cooing, Long as smiles flash lightning (and eyes stream like clouds in answer) From a bride like the sun when the mist parts, revealing herself luminous in splendor.