48 Poverty poems

I live a life of appetite and, yes, that's right, I live a life of privilege in New York, Eating buttered toast in bed with cunty fingers on Sunday morning. Say that again? I have a rule— I never give to beggars in the street who hold their hands out. I woke up this morning in my air-conditioning. At the end of my legs were my feet. Foot and foot stretched out outside the duvet looking for me! Get up. Giddyup. Get going. My feet were there on the far side of my legs. Get up. Giddyup. Get going. I don't really think I am going to. Obama is doing just fine. I don't think I'm going to. Get up. Giddyup. Get going. I can see out the window it isn't raining. So much for the endless forecasts, always wrong. The poor are poorer than they ever were. The rich are richer than the poor. Is it true about the poor? It's always possible to be amusing. I saw a rat down in the subway. So what if you saw a rat. I admire the poor profusely. I want their autograph. They make me shy. I keep my distance. I'm getting to the bottom of the island. Lower Broadway comes to a boil and City Hall is boiling. I'm half asleep but I'm awake. At the other end of me are my feet In shoes of considerable sophistication Walking down Broadway in the heat. I'm half asleep in the heat. I'm, so to speak, wearing a hat. I'm no Saint Francis. I'm in one of my trances. When I look in a mirror, There's an old man in a trance. There's a Gobi Desert, And that's poetry, or rather rhetoric. You see what happens if you don't make sense? It only makes sense to not. You feel the flicker of a hummingbird It takes a second to find. You hear a whirr. It's here. It's there. It hovers, begging, hand out.

There is no Rescue Mission where it isn’t freezing from the need that created it. The lost children distill to pure chemical. Where Good is called No-Tone it’s the one who cries out who doesn’t get a coat. The children fuse colors because they don’t want to separate. Daughters shot off of hydrants who cut each other in the neck and gut, don’t care which one of them will end up later in surgery. And drugged sons pretending to be costumes, well, they’re not welcome to comprehension either. Why does a wild child confuse a moon with a hole in his skin? One was born soaked in gin. His first sip was from a bottle of denial. What can “leave me alone” mean after that? The system is settled, dimensions fixed. Another one’s hand feels like a starfish. Makes me hysterical like the word perestroika. But they all dig the way the pepper is rosy in the vodka. It’s verbocity that creates jokers. Brick and grit are the candy and frosting where volunteers and teachers write cards that go: “Donate books that say NOT and NO and poets who say Urn instead of Oh.” How do the children convert their troubles into hip-hop? Dunno—but it’s wonderful.

We hadn’t got color up till then. And if I had a nickel, why, that was for milk. Milk money: the money a body gained. Was just me on that hillside and the kite, red & white waked up into the wind. Hardly anybody knew me then. Oh, Lord how quickly the things of this world came and went. Practically the first thing I notice when I get back. Wind, and I am lifted. Wind and I am hauled ahead by string and air. The bows sinuate the air, I hear them tatter. A certain kindness to that hill, its slope gone gaily green against the eve and oh, the tail dipped; the string slipped. Uppity huff and drag of hawk air plundering eggs in the sparrow’s nest. You left this fragment, this bit of shell behind.

Out of cash, out of well-fitting trousers, Out of soap and apples, Out of pencils, out of my keeper’s Reach. I wish to set myself afire But may not. This morning (Last night) in the common room I watched the administration Of oxygen to one who had none And I would not sit down, demanding To do so. Later I happened on a man At the piano, and though I have happened five or six times On men at the piano, None moved his hand like this Within the keys. I sat beside him, looking for a sound A chest sound. Not listening; I don’t listen Anymore. I make music But I don’t listen.

at the unemployment office I know it can be a two hour deathly wait before one’s name is called out so I find a chair and bury my head in a book that I brought to read sitting beside me, a man and a woman converse talk of years past, of people they knew and Leonard, is he still in prison? yeah, he’s still doing time well, that’s good, I guess, means he’s still alive a young girl walks in, short black halter top and airbrushed-on jeans her breasts pouting up past a too-low neckline the men, the women, all stare whether they’d like to or not Leonard’s friends exchange stories yeah, my ex, she just wants my money I tell her, well, go work then! and they laugh between the irony life, huh, she tells him,it’s crazy, the things we get into, he agrees the rest of us caught silently in their exchange agree, as well his arms are thick with hair and tattoos of skills and scrawled out indecipherable letters of the alphabet yeah, this chick that was riding with me once, he tells her got her jacket belt caught on my wheel I didn’t even know it until I got to the next light I went back, she was alright, just fell off, didn’t get hurt or nothing she was pissed though. “just fell off, didn’t get hurt,” what does he mean? this story just drops off, I want to know a little more, a lot more I mean, how fast was the bike going when she fell off did she ruin the belt, scrape her nose did they drink a lot of beer afterwards? and so the time drags by, the line lengthens now and then people unbury their heads from their midmorning dragging into noon thoughts women adjust their bra straps scold their kids with unfulfilled warnings the folks behind the counter look at us holding their half empty cups of coffee ah, if only there was a dollar for every story

Child of distress, who meet’st the bitter scorn Of fellow-men to happier prospects born, Doomed Art and Nature’s various stores to see Flow in full cups of joy—and not for thee; Who seest the rich, to heaven and fate resigned, Bear thy afflictions with a patient mind; Whose bursting heart disdains unjust control, Who feel’st oppression’s iron in thy soul, Who dragg’st the load of faint and feeble years, Whose bread is anguish, and whose water tears; Bear, bear thy wrongs—fulfill thy destined hour, Bend thy meek neck beneath the foot of Power; But when thou feel’st the great deliverer nigh, And thy freed spirit mounting seeks the sky, Let no vain fears thy parting hour molest, No whispered terrors shake thy quiet breast: Think not their threats can work thy future woe, Nor deem the Lord above like lords below;— Safe in the bosom of that love repose By whom the sun gives light, the ocean flows; Prepare to meet a Father undismayed, Nor fear the God whom priests and kings have made.

No, I am not deformed. I wear these socks Because I haven't any gloves, And my fingers are bitten with frost. They feel like stumps. Luckily, I finished covering The citrus tree with sheets of burlap. Before darkness, I will light a smudge pot Near the mummified trunk, Then anoint my hands in a blue salve. Yesterday was cold But the freeze is on now. I must remind myself Not to lick any cars. Mr. Nishizawa, a house over, Told me his nephew Lost a fourth of his tongue For that reason. Years ago, The rosebushes were ruined to a freeze And have never come back. If needed, I will stay up all night And pray, will let the hoarfrost Burn in my chest. My grandfather Ate the yield from this tree After he died. I saw him.

1. What were we watching on the tube under mildewed ceilings in Eastlands? A Kenyan guy shaking a rattle made from a can while another guy in the band was talking to the queen about making sound out of anything? The queen smiled. The Jubilee receiving line filed through. 2. We shimmied past tin shacks selling wigs and bananas, coke and goat lungs; the tine of a kalimba kissed my face. My face kissed the blue plastic of a soda bottle sliding down a hill of glass. I paid the gang leaders for protection and we walked into the hills of airplane garbage, black and blue plastic bags glowing in the sun spray over the heads of the marabou stalking the mounds with their knife-blade beaks. 3. Stevie Wonder and Elton John moved through the Jubilee line. Prince Charles thanked God for the weather as the camera cut to fireworks spewing over Hyde Park and then to an image of Nairobi and the Slum Drummers picking metal out of the collages of garbage. 4. My jeans were charred from the tin-can fires, and the grilling pig guts when some men looked up from scraps of wire— and you went back and forth with them in Swahili before they offered us some sizzling fat, before we thanked them with our coy smiles and moved on with Michael who took us down a maze of alleyways where tin shacks were floating on polymers and nitrogen and a dozen pigs from nowhere snouted the garbage. 5. You were saying “Dad”—when a marabou-hacked bag shot some shit on our shoes—“Dad, kinship roles are always changing”— when a woman asked us for a few shillings and salt for her soup. Salt? Did I hear her right? Or was it Swahili for something else? And through the sooty wind of charcoal fires and creaking rusty tin you were saying, “Hannah Arendt called Swahili a degraded language of former slave holders.” In the soot of my head—I was listening— and Michael was asking for more shillings for the gang guys who were “a little fucked up,” he said, “but needed help”— and when I turned around the heads of chickens were twitching, the feathers fluttering down on oozing sludge; “Arendt called it a nineteenth century kind of no language,” you were saying, “spoken”—as we were jolted by a marabou eating a shoe—“spoken—by the Arab ivory and slave caravans.” 6. Out of bottles, cans, pipes, mangled wire—the Slum Drummers twisted and hacked, joined and seamed their heaven into the black plastic ghost of a mashed pot. Pure tones blew from the vibrato holes like wind through Makadara where the breath of God flew through sewage pipes. I heard in a tubophone the resurrection of ten men rising out of coal and pig snouts into the blue Kenyan sky where a marabou swallowed a purse—and a woman’s conga was parting at the seams above boiling soup cans. 7. Down a slope of stinking plastic you kept on about Arendt— “a hybrid mixture of Bantu with enormous Arab borrowings” I could say poa poa  sawa sawa  karibu. We could make a kalimba out of a smashed pot and pour beans into a can and shake it for the queen. Yesterday in the soundless savannah the wildebeests and zebras seemed to float through the green-gold grass toward Tanzania. We could hear a lion breathe; we could hear wind through tusks. 8. On TV the guys were grinning into metal go-go drums; hammering twisted sewage pipes and cut wire like sailors from Mombasa— harder nailed than da Gama’s voyage down the Arab trade coast— 9. So, where are we—in a slum of no language? Walking through steam shovels of light, breaking over mounds of metal as if the sky were just blue plastic? Isn’t English just a compost heap of devouring grammar, joined, hacked, bruised words, rotting on themselves? I keep following you, daughter of scrutiny, into plastic fields of carrion between sight and site, vision not visionary, pig guts on the grill, trying to keep balance between streams of sewage and the sky, as you keep hacking, Sophia, at the de-centered, the burning text, anthropology’s shakedown. A marabou just knifed the arm of a woman picking bottles out of plastic bags. A rooster crows from under a pile of galvanized tin as if it were morning on a farm.

Over there, trees are sheltering A hunchedback hut... A slum, no more... Roof askew, walls and wainscoting Falling away... Moss hides the door. Only one shutter, hanging... But Seeping over the windowsill, Like frosted breath, proof that this hut, This slum, is living, breathing still. Corkscrew of smoke... A wisp of blue Escapes the hovel, whose soul it is... Rises to God himself, and who Receives the news and makes it his.

I sing of Morrisville (if you call this cry a song). I (if you call this painful voice by that great name) sing the poverty of my region and of the wrong end of Morrisville. You summer people will say that all its ends are wrong, but there, right there, the very end of the wrong end— a house with windows sagging, leaning roadward as in defense or maybe defiance next to the granite ledge, our cliff of broken stone that shoulders our dilapidated one-lane iron bridge. Who lives here? I don’t know. But they (Hermes reward them) made this extraordinary garden, geraniums, petunias and nasturtiums planted in every crevice and all the footholds of the cliff. And then they painted the cliff-face, painted the old stone; no design, just swatches of color, bold rough splashes irregularly, garish orange and livid blue. Is it fluorescent, do these stones glow in the dark? Maybe. I only know they glow in the day, so vivid I stopped my car, whereupon two others came inquiring also, two crows in the broken spars of the white pine tree, cawing above the house. Why had those who inhabited this corner of poverty painted the stones? Was it that the flowers in living bravery nevertheless made too meager a show for the ruined cliff? Or did they think to bring art to nature, somehow to improve this corner of ugliness? For my part I thought how these colors were beautiful and yet strange in their beauty, ugly colors, garish orange, livid blue; they reminded me of those Spanish cemeteries I saw in New Mexico, tin mirrors and plastic flowers in the desert. Then I knew why the stones had been painted: to make reparation, such as the poor might make, whose sorrow had been done here, this desecration. Is not this the burden of all poor lands everywhere, the basis of poverty? A spoiled land makes spoiled people. The poor know this. I guess the crows know too, because off they flew, cawing above the bridge and the slashed hills surrounding Morrisville. I started my car and drove out on the iron bridge which rumbled its sullen affirmation. And I sang as I sing now (if you care to call it song) my people of Morrisville who live where all the ends are wrong.