505 History and politics poems

A fall over rock, Metal answering to water, Is the seal of this spot; A land trodden by music And the tune forgot. Of a region savage, The territory that was broken, Silver gushed free; And earth holy, earth meek shall receive it In humility. This, not dwelt in, this haunted, The country of the proud, Is curdling to stone, And careless of the feet of the waters As they glance from it down.

Chile, 1834 A month before his dinner with the visiting Spanish lawyer, he had “set out for the purpose of geologizing,” and rode back over the ridge of the Chilecauquen with a huge jute bag of living shells from the sandy flats at the coast, and with another, as full, of dead barnacles scraped from the rock. A few months forward from that dinner —on the island of San Pedro, where the Beagle was anchored awaiting him—he would be sneaking up on a fox “of a kind very rare” and donking it stoutly “on the head with my geological hammer.” (The fox, he’ll write, “is now in the Zoological Society.”) So what does he think, when the Spanish lawyer expresses a disbelief that the King of England would be so loco as to bother to ship to this sensible, orderly country a man “to pick up beetles and lizards, and to break stones”? No, the whiff of something “off ”—like suspect meat—attends eccentric stunts like these. “I do not like it: if one of us were to go and do such things in England, do not you think the King of England would very shortly command us to leave his shores?” Renous, another student of bugs and rocks, from Germany, is also there at dinner, and he mentions then that once, in a house in San Fernando, he’d been discovered contemplating the transformation of caterpillars to butterflies. He couldn’t deny it: there they were, the writhing green proof, in an open box! “The Padres and the Governor consulted, and agreed it must be some heresy”—and so Renous was arrested. Darwin can only shake his head in a quiet bemusement as his guests converse. Those inchling creatures crawling over their chopped-up foliage, heads as blunt as thimbled thumbs . . .heretical? How could anybody believe that the innocent jumble in the baskets and flasks of a naturalist is dangerous? * And Lillian Colton—the woman in Owatonna, Minnesota who for forty years has avidly collected the seeds of that state and, with them (“poking them into place with toothpicks and gluing them down”), has portraitured “American presidents, movie stars, country musicians, rock and roll legends, scientific and religious leaders (including Mother Teresa)” —what suspiciousness might seize the Spanish lawyer if he saw her on her rounds? What edgy wariness would grip him if he chanced on Nellie Staves, “at 87 perhaps the most famous Adirondack trapper,” out in the summer to harvest shell-shaped fungus off the dead trees of those shaded, spinous hills? —she’ll work for twenty hours straight on one, with the point of an old school compass, stippling it into the scene of a great alert-eyed ram or a sunrise, watching as the fungus’s own interior, brown juices dye the image into permanence. Who would these represent, for the Spanish lawyer, what forbidden Other?—a girl in the corner, walling her attention away from her sisters’ strident hip-hop, by reading a fanciful tale of witches? a girl on a dancer pole at Sturgis, strobing her tits for the boys in a quick 1-2-1 semaphore of fuck-the-work-week revelry? Surely not. Surely these are no threat to his world. And yet for nothing more than positing a newly ordered sky map, Giordano Bruno was led in chains from his cell in the Roman prison of Castel San’Angelo, there where he’d spent eight years as the Inquisition hammered at his ideas and his calm resolve. It was February 19th, 1600; he was tied to an iron stake; a wedge was stuffed in his mouth, to prevent any final utterance of blasphemy; and he was burned alive. The leg skin bubbled off of his body like a Christmas pig’s. It turns out that a redone sky implies a redone God—and a God is intolerant of this, a God is jealous of any counter claim to the pedigree of His cosmos. Yes, but . . . surely not this mushroom picker? not this boy who simply speaks to invisible friends as he wanders around the alleys? Oh but that would depend on the given Spanish lawyer of that given day and circumstance. In Ghent, a cock was put on trial and sentenced to death for repeatedly disturbing the peace of the Lord’s day, Sunday. It had been warned; so now it was just, to lead this beast to a chopping block —restoring the sanctified order. * Kansas, 2004 Ah, for a witty transition from “cock” to my neighbors Suzette and Edie!—lesbians, now in love with each other for over a decade and wanting only to declare their love in a marriage vow, “like anyone,” as Edie says. Not that my schoolboy humor would find favor in their reading life . . . although we get along; some shared affinity enables The Church of the Gay Girls and The Orthodox Congregation of Guy to coexist with an amiability. Still, I’ve witnessed other people pass them by with the slitted, ophidian stare of xenophobia. Suzette and Edie —are they the new apostasy? are they our own Anne Hutchinson? In 1638 she was found guilty, after a two-day trial, of heresy—of being “a woman not fitt for our Society.” With will, she had embraced doctrinal misinterpretations, “some of them blasphemus, others erroneus and all Unsafe, and of the Devill of Hell,” and she was excommunicated from Massachusetts Bay Colony “evermore.” Her actual crime?—a claim “the Holy Spirit illumines the heart of every true believer” without the need of a minister intervening. For this, she was harried into the wilds —it was called a “hiving-out”—and set at the mercy of wolf and of winter, “and it were Death to return.” Her other actual crime?—that after a pregnancy, she had been delivered “of thirtie monstrus Births or therabowts at once, some of them Bigger, some Lessr, some of one shape, some of An other, few of any Perfect shape, None at all of them of Human shape”—which perhaps is what you’d expect from a woman of “nimble Witt and active Spirit and verie Voluble Tonggue.” At the Republican convention, it was, indeed, the voluble tongue that Edie always flapped so saucily (and too, I’d guess, her rainbow-hue WE’RE ALREADY BEDDED . . . WHY NOT WEDDED? T-shirt) that (on her side) led inevitably to the violence. A surly officer suggested that she move. She pointed out how she was already in the caged-off square allowed for free-speech protest, and had no intention of leaving. There were “gestures they exchanged”. . . and then a stun gun’s 50,000 volts were suddenly alive inside her, just enough to crumple her into helplessness so that, when the panic began, she was trampled by friends and police alike. A lung was crushed, and when I visited three weeks later, her skin was still a nightmare Turkish rug of bruise. (For a moment, I saw in the air around her the first disabling gust of snow in the woods at the border of Massachusetts Bay in 1638.) To be fair, I should add that the confrontational officer doing crowd control went home with his head little more than a pocket of blood and neural damage. Do not, I warn you, ever lightly cross a Wiccan bowler. * Terms I haven’t yet used, from my pile of notes: separatist, sedition, dogma. Finally, though, when those clouds of abstraction open up, it’s always one specific ordinary rainy day, in Chicago, in 1961. I’m thirteen, squeaky-voiced, and with an adam’s apple popping from my thin throat like a doorknob—while my father is large, he fought the neighbor’s crazy German shepherd to a standstill once, and behind him are generations of him, solemn and knowing. We’re standing there in front of the house, in a dim autumnal downpour, and it wouldn’t look to anyone else like an even match, my scrawny shouts, his thousands of years of righteousness; and yet, in emotional terms, I have the upper hand. I won’t believe in his God. I won’t believe in any God, in any synagogue, in any mumbo jumbo or rabbinical teetotum, and I’m screaming this and screaming this and screaming this, until I see the rain become his face, and for the only time except his mother’s funeral on a similar day of wet and chill in a shivering mix, my father cries in front of me. And God, if He’s there, must write my name down on a list that He’ll turn over to His deputies on Earth —His Spanish lawyers. There are many terms for this, but only one rain. Now it’s falling, grayish twill, on a hill along the coast of the Chonos Archipelago islands. 1835. A mound of seals in the distance, “huddled together, asleep: they appeared to be of a loving disposition; but even pigs would be ashamed of their dirt,” which is picked at by the turkey-buzzards. Terns, gulls, black-necked swans. A deposit of sandstone. “Four great snowy cones” of the local volcanoes. He couldn’t be happier. He has computed the number of eggs in a tenth-of-an-inch of a sea-slug’s potent slime, he has suggested how “a great volume might be written, describing one of these beds of sea-weed.” The otter. The spunky Chilean mouse. He has read “a most interesting discussion on the history of the common potato.” He couldn’t be more mesmerized in the grand salons of Paris than here, in the rain, with his sodden insect net. And who would complain? He isn’t any rooster. He isn’t going to rudely wake anyone from a long sound sleep.

And the Levites shall speak, and say unto all the men of Israel, with a loud voice: —Deuteronomy 27:14 Over the border the barrier winds, devouring orchards of various kinds. Cursed be he that taketh away the landmark of his neighbor. And all the people shall say, Amen.

September 11, 2001 They walk past you weeping for the leaves that burnt & fell, the wood exposed like bone, sculpture that suddenly emerges from white haze. You old fortune-teller, you could have told them in their vibrant grief whispering through the night wind your breath held in your heart like the trembling promise of tomorrow, just before dawn there was no pain you are the wood not the leaf, falling is not falling but offering.

I kept a letter from my hometown in Lithuania, from one who still holds a dominion somewhere with her youthful charm. In it she placed her sorrow and her affection: A blade of grass from Ponar. This blade of grass with a flickering puff of dying cloud ignited, letter by letter, the faces of the letters. And over letter-faces in murmuring smolder: The blade of grass from Ponar. This blade of grass is now my world, my miniature home, where children play the fiddle in a line on fire. They play the fiddle and legendary is their conductor: The blade of grass from Ponar. I will not separate from my hometown’s blade of grass. My good, longed-for earth will make room for both. And then I will bring a gift to the Lord: The blade of grass from Ponar. Translated from the Yiddish

In memory of   Janusz Korczak What did the Old Doctor do in a cattle car riding to Treblinka on the 5th of August over a few hours of   blood flow over the dirty river of time I do not know What did Charon the volunteer do ferryman without an oar did he give the children the remains of   his breath and leave for himself just the shiver in the bones I do not know Did he lie to them for instance in small numbing doses picking from their sweaty heads the skittish lice of   fear I do not know but for that but later but there in Treblinka all their terror all the tears were against him oh it was only so many minutes a whole life is that a lot or a little I was not there I don’t know suddenly the Old Doctor saw the children become old like him older and older they had to catch up to the grayness of  ash then when he was hit by an Askar or SS man they saw how the Doctor became a child like them smaller and smaller until he was not born since then together with the Old Doctor there are plenty of  them nowhere I know Translated from the Polish

I rubbed wax crayon against blowing paper. From the rock face footed a dancer white through red. My family gave me over to it, gone for the river. Were I a peasant harvesting grapes near Beaune in the last century, even, I might have dreamed a saint lifting off for Arles, Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, and knowing about cannon in that long peace, might have been troubled therefore that my flier hauled a magnum of the best and bloodied the west sky with it and vanished. My fisting that loose sheet in place was secretarial, not visionary! Already in that decade small tribes entered the void like windows on a skyscraper when the bent janitor makes his way. But those flick back on each night, costly difference. It is not only portents in dream or flapping images of the gone or the soon-to-be-going or the tremblingly poised that catch like undertow the foot in tide-rip toeing down the singing or remembered beach. We study populations in the forests, we hold the paper flat, mark, note, warn—the dictated prophecies do their work, we do some work— cut horn from rhinos so they won’t be poached. But, to go on from there, one needs to stand in the doorway some evening and feel the air as if it were fire pulling illusionlessly, letting the draw of one fact heat its chain of links, such as, Japan clear-cutting forests in Siberia where tigers not already harvested lope their dwindling range, two hundred as the hinge for their growled arc of existence, bones of the others ground to powders for old men’s potencies. One needs to feel the tug of the draft on skin, the drag of process utterly anciently itself. Faster, now, the pull is from birth through dwelling through dissolution, along lines streaming through us, ageless winds.

found pins by the millions while meticulously stripping a portion of Manhattan worked over by women who mended between appointments: the harlot’s artifacts include extracts of old wax paper wrappers filled with pin after pin, — imagine all sixteenths spilled from the inch ruler; imagine each a singular spoke of tin, each one fell stroke in a ledger; less than a cent of metal total, a dowry. Her nicks of time, dropped stitches, poke-throughs taken in, how each man may have fit against the satin hem of her memory.

They said I got away in a boat And humbled me at the inquiry. I tell you I sank as far that night as any Hero. As I sat shivering on the dark water I turned to ice to hear my costly Life go thundering down in a pandemonium of Prams, pianos, sideboards, winches, Boilers bursting and shredded ragtime. Now I hide In a lonely house behind the sea Where the tide leaves broken toys and hatboxes Silently at my door. The showers of April, flowers of May mean nothing to me, nor the Late light of June, when my gardener Describes to strangers how the old man stays in bed On seaward mornings after nights of Wind, takes his cocaine and will see no one. Then it is I drown again with all those dim Lost faces I never understood, my poor soul Screams out in the starlight, heart Breaks loose and rolls down like a stone. Include me in your lamentations.

Abraham Lincoln his hand and pen he will be good but god knows When