505 History and politics poems

How can we die when we're already prone to leaving the table mid-meal like Ancient Ones gone to breathe elsewhere. Salt sits still, but pepper's gone rolled off in a rush. We've practiced dying for a long time: when we skip dance or town, when we chew. We've rounded out like dining room walls in a canyon, eaten through by wind—Sorry we rushed off; the food wasn't ours. Sorry the grease sits white on our plates, and the jam that didn't set— use it as syrup to cover every theory of us.

In the morning of the tribe this name Ancapagari was given to these mountains. The name, then alive, spread into the world and never returned. Ancapagari: no foot-step ever spoken, no mule deer killed from its foothold, left for dead. Ancapagari opened the stones. Pine roots gripped peak rock with their claws. Water dug into the earth and vanished, boiling up again in another place. The water was bitten by aspen, generations of aspen shot their light colored trunks into space. Ancapagari. At that time, if the whisper was in your mouth, you were lighted. Now these people are buried. The root-taking, finished. Buried in everything, thousands taken root. The roots swell, nesting. Openings widen for the roots to surface. They sway within you in steady wind of your breath. You are forever swinging between this being and another, one being and another. There is a word for it crawling in your mouth each night. Speak it. Ancapagari has circled, returned to these highlands. The yellow pines deathless, the sparrow hawks scull, the waters are going numb. Ancapagari longs to be spoken in each tongue. It is the name of the god who has come from among us.

Deer do not tremble, I know this. My bone and sinew twisted into fallow slenderness and the tibia twig thin. Four rods finished with a cloven hoof planted on rotting leaf mould: gloomy weight of the gold altar. The poet's words are wind-blown apples. Plucked lute strings vibrate to silence as I watch Caesar with my velvet eyes, long ears poised to absorb the rush of animal clamour that is hushed in the shells of human skulls. Despite the blood threat of power my doe body would not spring away — no flick of spotted fur into shadow.

Even now, after twice her lifetime of grief and anger in the very place, whoever comes to climb these narrow stairs, discovers how the bookcase slides aside, then walks through shadow into sunlit room, can never help but break her secrecy again. Just listening is a kind of guilt: the Westerkirk repeats itself outside, as if all time worked round towards her fear, and made each stroke die down on guarded streets. Imagine it— four years of whispering, and loneliness, and plotting, day by day, the Allied line in Europe with a yellow chalk. What hope she had for ordinary love and interest survives her here, displayed above the bed as pictures of her family; some actors; fashions chosen by Princess Elizabeth. And those who stoop to see them find not only patience missing its reward, but one enduring wish for chances like my own: to leave as simply as I do, and walk at ease up dusty tree-lined avenues, or watch a silent barge come clear of bridges settling their reflections in the blue canal.

Miep managed to snap them up for 27.50 guilders. Burgundy-colored 
suede and leather  ... — Anne Frank, Tuesday, August 10, 1943 When Miep took us home with her She held us up in the air, Eye-level with those eyes You may know, eyes spelling Sorrow-girl, wait-for-me, Happiness-around-a-corner- One-day, hurry-back, don’t-tell. Two new hands took us in, Skin cradling skin. How empty we had been, Only a little bit worn — Not a penny, not a pebble Dwelling within. We became an altar, An offering red as wine, A wishing well. She was made to carry us Near and far, We were made to bear The pressure of her feet In darkness, in light, Their sweetness, their heat. We were getting used to her. Miep calls us a handsome pair.

Out of me unworthy and unknown The vibrations of deathless music; “With malice toward none, with charity for all.” Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions, And the beneficent face of a nation Shining with justice and truth. I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds, Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln, Wedded to him, not through union, But through separation. Bloom forever, O Republic, From the dust of my bosom!

The Baltic Sea froze in 1307. Birds flew north From the Mediterranean in early January. There were meteor storms throughout Europe. On the first day of Lent Two children took their own lives: Their bodies Were sewn into goatskins And were dragged by the hangman’s horse The three miles down to the sea. They were given a simple grave in the sand. The following Sunday, Meister Eckhart Shouted that a secret word Had been spoken to him. He preached That Mary Magdalene Sought a dead man in the tomb But, in her confusion, found Only two angels laughing. . . This was a consequence of her purity And her all too human grief. The Baltic Sea Also froze in 1303— Nothing happened that was worthy of poetry.

I. I watch them line up, ark-like, two by two, chatting quietly, and after the teacher passes, one pushes, and the one pushed begins the chase. This is how the orphans marched through Warsaw in '42, I tell the behaved ones: orderly and under orders. And I'm about to begin that horrific story, the one they don't yet know, when I pause to open the door for a little air. And there they are again, arms akimbo, like two stooges, the Angel of Death, and the Angel of Forgetfulness, those vaudeville comics, those incorrigible face-making kids, stuck forever—you first—no you—in the undersized doorframe of the museum I will, for lack of a better word, call childhood. II. Did I say Angels? Clearly, I meant my great-aunts whom you haven't yet met. My sister called them From-This-You-Shouldn't-Know and May-You-Never-Forget. I preferred Horseradish and Charoset, that bittersweet matzoh sandwich munched at Pesach between prayers. Everyone I knew was still alive, and no one cared that in Venice, that very summer, Ginsberg, in the name of the Jews, forgave Pound. Hadn't I'd forgone my own bar mitzvah for a weekend in Miami Beach where that borscht-belt-south social director and shuffleboard champ first shticked There's Noah business like Shoah business, soon after Lillian Hellman ushered her de-judaicized Anne Frank onto the stage. III. Are you writing another Holocaust poem? my son asks. He's gauging my anger at this interruption—a love sonnet, less so?—but it takes eight dollars of gas just to get to his summer job.To Hell with the poem, I need me some shekels, he sings, misquoting both Ravikovitch and Snoop Dogg. Poetry was nowhere in my father's house, or money either, our doorposts marked pass-over; although in a pinch Dad could recite Kipling's "Gunga Din." Make fun if you must, my mother says, but look in the mirror and I'm here to tell you that your father was a better man than all those anti-Semitic Pounds and Eliots rolled up into one. IV. That was twenty-three years ago, before my mother, cradling his neck and not yet crying, waited, while in East New York, the ambulance raced, and the Angel of Death loitered. Are you comfortable? she asks, adjusting my father's pillow, while he, ever the emcee, mimics Henny Youngman's I make a living. Poetry makes nothing happen, Auden might repeat, were he here, and what wouldn't I give, at this moment, for his stiff British upper lip. What's one more death in the family, Otto Frank argues, expunging not grief but sex from his daughter's diary, and what parent today would dare to play jury or judge. V. Are you writing another Holocaust poem? the Angel of Consciousness, who sits, while I muse, on my right shoulder and whom I often confuse with her errant two-headed twin, the Angel of Conscience, asks. And now I'm recalling my home office, the Akeidah above the desk, the knife blade drawn downward, that Angel, what's her name, restraining Abraham's implausibly blood-stained arm. And because I, exiled to the basement when my Isaac arrived, overlooked that drawing, it hung ten months above my newborn son's head. I feel wicked sleeping in this warm bed, my daughter proclaims, rehearsing her Anne Frank and pausing anxiously for applause. VI. Burn everything after I'm dead, Kafka said, poking his prewar Jewish head into yet one more of my poems. He's trying to explain the fatherland to the fatherless. No one reads poetry anymore, anyway, my mother, quoting from her own unpublished diary, writes.And who doesn't want to go on living even after death?

Through the meridian’s fine blue hairlines, the admirals are converging in their fish-hulled ships, with their frogmen and sirens, and tanks with knotted chain flails that beat the ground before them as they crawl. Behind them the cities dim out, on the foredeck the admirals sigh to lean from the curving bows, to trail their fingertips in the water . . . All alone on the landmass, the Ship’s Artist simply draws what he sees: red men with arms like flesh clubs, blue-daubed men with parasol feet and fish with weeping human faces. The sonic boom arrives at his feet in the palest ripples. In the painting, Gloriana rides under arms towards Tilbury Town. Her profile shimmers in the sodium lights that seem to cast no shadows before or behind her. Like compass pencils of light, their fingertips spread out the nervous systems more complex than spiral nebulae. Orchards of mines grow up on the ocean floor. Now under radar they study the green road glowing and add a late-rising moon. The sea so full of maprooms, and the cliffs chalked with weaponry symbols, trailing the phosphorescence of minesquads. Only the grassblown Norman ringmounds go on dreaming of Monet picture hats and streaming scarves, the bunker disguised as a picnic, that went on forever. Now the Cathedral at Bayeux, with its window and views, is rolled up and the Conqueror’s navy on its blue worsted waves and Hengist and Horsa, the Escorial with its green shoals of ships, all are safely rolled up. Behind the Atlantic Wall, that Rommel called “Cloud-Cuckoo-Land,” the white-and-liver-cows moo through the milky light. The human faces carved on Norman beams face out to the sea, which has grown this answering forest of rigging. And very soon, just as soon as the sea can see the land and the land the sea the two of them will go to war.

Over treasure and land some texts will say it had Little to do with slavery or the newly Discovered yellow planet Few men watched the glaciers recede From shuttles they had built During the hemorrhage years When they’d gathered all the genes down from the ledges I’ll be a fig or a sycamore tree Or without hands By then doctors and poets Would have found a cure for prayer • Or have you shoved the door shut In the face of the dark? Have you body and light the trap Of retribution doing unto you What it does to others? You protest In the streets and papers and I leave For a faraway land Where with pill and scalpel And a distant reckoning If he should lick his lips Or clench his fist I shall find his second left toe Infected puffy From a bump I’ll lance it and squeeze Out the pus and offer Him an antibiotic I can’t refuse therefore I am • The first time I saw you it was hot I was fed up The second time your wife gave birth to a macerated boy I had nothing to tell you About letting go of the dying In the morning you were gone Had carried your father back to your house His cracked skull I didn’t know that was your wife When I raised my voice To those who were praying From behind the wall to keep it down I was trying to listen to your baby’s heartbeat With a gadget a century old • Anemic From so much loss giving birth If you give blood in the desert you won’t Get it back not your iron pills or magic hat I put your thin Hemoglobin up to the light and called out To the donors Donors If you want to know your blood type And it’s a match You must donate Few came some indifferent to my condition Not having heard of it And willing anyhow • And the world is south The night a bandit with gasoline And I’m your dancing lizard mirth I put my one arm up And bring my one foot down on a hot zinc top The nearest hospital was the dawn She didn’t know her daughter on her back was The entry wound and she the exit She ran a brothel so The officer said Where the rebels came and went And ran into the government boys Her girl’s femur the size of the bullet • He was from the other side rumors Had a bullet through his left arm Or had it bitten off by a camel A camel elephant of the desert never forgets what you are If you aren’t kind to it When I met him his bladder was the size Of a watermelon his prostate a cantaloupe You cannot catheterize A man forever Every hour on the hour his left arm stump Hanging his good arm holding His penis his buttocks in deep squeeze A charge from the rear without spillage This poor murderous thief desperately single- Handedly began slapping his own ass As if he were dashing a stallion in a raid On some unarmed village • The mind in the field The brine in the field Whether I Is a diphthong codependent on What isn’t there to stay in the field The good you act is equal To the good you doubt Most have lost many You are either prosperous Or veteran in the field • A mother offers not necessarily Sells her one-eyed son For an education if you’ll bring him back And stone dust for one With congenital illness And little boy with malaria Same old gas Money mixed with blood Transfusion the doctor’s perfect record broken Nobility of taking A life you Who must walk to and from your house The jeep’s upkeep The donkey-cart ambulance • One boot left behind The one-boot photo I wanted On a book military black the quad a clinic’s Special Forces spun By his dangling heels from The pickup truck rushed To a central town altered combative With two scalp lacerations and blood In his auditory canal I was a lover of loss I tossed The boot in the capital of suffering