517 Social commentaries poems

Many nights while walking home after work, from downtown to an apartment below a market, I’d think of Alfred Espinas: “We do not get together to die, but to live and to improve life.” Sudden changes of weather and contagious diseases nearly broke the spirits of many friends that winter, but charmingly we made habits of dancing and sharing meals in our cramped rooms. Our landlords were thieves and our bosses were pessimists, yet we dreamed of a new phase of civilization, one of kindness and goodwill. “We need communes,” Oscar exclaimed. Silvia argued, “But islands are corpses, let’s think instead of syndicates.” Mondays we’d return to dirty dishes, copy machines, and dull knives, and we spent the next three centuries doing what we were paid to do.

All our life so much laundry; each day’s doing or not comes clean, flows off and away to blend with other sins of this world. Each day begins in new skin, blessed by the elements charged to take us out again to do or undo what’s been assigned. From socks to shirts the selves we shed lift off the line as if they own a life apart from the one we offer. There is joy in clean laundry. All is forgiven in water, sun and air. We offer our day’s deeds to the blue-eyed sky, with soap and prayer, our arms up, then lowered in supplication.

This tree has two million and seventy-five thousand leaves. Perhaps I missed a leaf or two but I do feel triumphant at having persisted in counting by hand branch by branch and marked down on paper with pencil each total. Adding them up was a pleasure I could understand; I did something on my own that was not dependent on others, and to count leaves is not less meaningful than to count the stars, as astronomers are always doing. They want the facts to be sure they have them all. It would help them to know whether the world is finite. I discovered one tree that is finite. I must try counting the hairs on my head, and you too. We could swap information.

^ now you have to go back through Ohio just to manage a few sweaters because it’s getting cold out there pack two grey-green duffels / most of your clothes are torn what else                    do you have to show for yourself stay in motels     drink bourbon & cut your fingertips on the zippers of your jeans / throw the oranges at the hero ships on the walls                     forget her ^ her touch—nearly seven hundred days away / the desk littered with candles & letters / last night folk music & a light bulb     swinging     humming sink backed up & the water flooded the dirty blue tiles—you just ducked out in another town you can imagine fresh basil in the kitchen window    orange peels ground down to dust          bicycles          farmland          the peripheral at peace with the eventual ^ you could show up at someone’s door          unannounced by the wind ^ collect weeds as though they are scarce sleep next to the man who takes care of the trees          the edge is close between two bodies          smokestacks line the sky ^ troubled by your body, you’re trembling at the gas station stay in a poorly insulated farmhouse north of the city wake to a lack of rain, an unbroken sky remember the moon from last night that seemed to drift if god were uneasy you would not know

Your mother called it "doing the pressing," and you know now how right she was. There is something urgent here. Not even the hiss under each button or the yellow business ground in at the neck can make one instant of this work seem unimportant. You've been taught to turn the pocket corners and pick out the dark lint that collects there. You're tempted to leave it, but the old lessons go deeper than habits. Everyone else is asleep. The odor of sweat rises when you do under the armpits, the owner's particular smell you can never quite wash out. You'll stay up. You'll have your way, the final stroke and sharpness down the long sleeves, a truly permanent edge.

I think it is interesting though not exactly amusing how we go from day to day with no money. How do we do it, friends ask, suspecting we really have some stash stacked away somewhere. But we certainly do not and we also do not know how we do it either. You sure are lucky, some of our friends say. I am none too sure of that though, as I wait for the winning lottery numbers to be announced on CKLW. Thursday in Detroit is the day of dreams. We have been dreaming of a place in the country lately and I’m none too sure that is very healthy. And speaking of health that’s also been a problem that probably has something to do with no money, since we’ve all been sick lately, taking turns politely of course. Could you bring me some more tea one of us will ask, and the other will. In between the coughing and worrying our thoughts have often turned to crime. We seriously wonder how we can get away with a bundle with as little risk as possible. Last week we took our last $12 out of the bank and noticed how much more they had there though we had none. Of course we wouldn’t rob that bank, they know us there as the ones who bring the rolls of pennies in. And just yesterday they fish-eyed us for trying to cash our son’s xmas bond from his grandparents after only one month. So we wouldn’t try to rob that bank, but I do know of one up north that may be possible. . . I know this just seems like romantic dreaming but I practically make a career of reading detective stories, and God knows, I have no other. Anyway if the right opportunity comes along, we are more than ready to meet it. But this is a time of waiting, the I Ching says, though it does not say how we are to eat while waiting. And soon we will have another mouth to feed— Ann now in her seventh month, and that is often in our thoughts. Besides all that we are both over thirty, artist and poet, still waiting to cross the great water. Meanwhile, day after day, there is still Detroit to be dealt with — a small pond says our friend Snee. Big fish we used to answer him, but that was a while back. Now we think maybe Lake Erie is the great water referred to in the I Ching, and if we wait long enough we can walk across — to Buffalo or Cleveland. In a healthy person, says the philosopher, self-pity can be a forerunner to action: once the problem is seen clearly, a solution may be found at hand. And as I said, I think it is interesting though not exactly amusing.

Attending to verbal constructs makes care long-term, not acute, which is for the best because, though flawed, each one is salvageable or replaceable unlike my flesh. Words can be compared with moments, houses, trees, wires, wires, trees, houses. All stand on their marks. Still, there’s a lot of overlap. I move my eyes to make time. I take their measure and create a duplicate.

In a hotel, even prayer feels adulterous, the skyline smudged in light, a distraction just before dusk. In the lobby a woman tells a stranger what she will do for three hundred dollars, what she will do for four. Some have the custom of opening a book randomly with a question in mind. Some have the custom of  forgetting. At six my friend beat his father at chess, beat his father’s friends so easily he wondered if  they tried. At seven he shook the governor’s hand. Don’t call it a failure; call it knowledge: the peculiar taste that filled his mouth as if   he had bitten his cheek. Whatever he risked did not matter, whatever he could imagine was already lost. Bored, the other boy coughed into his hands.

You can’t imagine what it’s like here. In her past life, she was a clandestine operator in ancient Egypt. In a past life she had her heart ripped out, ritual sacrifice. We all know what that means, right, to have your heart ripped out. Torn from the body, one’s “own” body, alive and torn. The unspeaking speaker. The man coughs. Orientation. Two bells, a motorcar on the street, on-lookers. H22-3416. Men, maybe four, inside. Vast numbers of people, faces turned to the east. Four nurses holding four swaddled babes, four bottles. Six men walking forward on a country road all wearing suits, coats, vests and ties. Upon his shoulders, one of the men carries a man with no legs. The man with no legs is wearing a bathrobe. In a landscape a train passes from top right to bottom left. People are packed inside as well as on the roof and holding on at the sides. One man, naked, his back turned to the window, light on inside. A bird in a cage hung on a hook at the top left-hand corner of the window. A man in profile to the left, eyes closed mouth open wide, singing. Or thought he was singing. He did. Or we did. The back of a chair and three tall mirrors. At their focal point a woman stands, arms akimbo. She’s wearing evening dress black high heels, long white gown, long black gloves, necklace, earrings. Outside the bakery, a horse-drawn hearse approaches. A woman in an apron tests green grapes eating them before placing bunches in a wooden crate. Inside a Quonset hut, there’s a long table with men sitting in chairs writing or paying attention to one man standing at the table, hands in the pockets of his jumpsuit. Shirtless men seated on the floor, some on towels or blankets, are doing exercises. Friday afternoon, cold grim day. We meet in the museum, at a picture called “Birmingham.” Sign on exterior wall saying “WELCOME.”

for Tim It was in August, such a lovely summer, that I began the massacring. The flower killing. Feeding the sunflowers to the industrial dough mixer. Soon there was enough yellow petal pulp for twelve loaves. For twelve times ten loaves. For twelve hundred loaves. One of the food critics in town came around to inquire about my baking system. . . . I glanced at the machete, propped next to the ovens. Toward October (and what auburn weather!), I still felt it, the substance of the soul, the libidinal terrible whatever. I sat out back with the two countergirls, Haley and Shayla. There was one cigarette, and we were sharing. Mourning is the horizon of all desire, we were commiserating. But Haley and Shayla, they’re— They sell Kaiser rolls and sliced Sicilian and then they leave and put on a fancy tanktop and go out for the evening. They go even though— The little white clematis cling to the fences. (At dawn the buds were dying as a sweet white bread was rising.) November How beautiful were the yellow mums in the thin wintry sun! The bread they made had the hue of golden potatoes. December Specks of red in lit windows: amaryllis that I stole and slaughtered and sold inside a pain de mie roll. I love how in the cold, my breath flowers before me. January, February I hacked through the ice to get at flower fetuses. The breads were very seedy. Spring It was really beginning. Baguettes made entirely of white peonies. Brioche from the blood of purple lilacs. Long lines outside the bakery’s door . . . What is the secret ingredient? I confessed:Flower. Flowers! Please, put me away. I am desperate. Summer I could not go through another. The woodbine had barely begun and already the mornings were full of the scent of them. Not one honeysuckle would go unsucked—unless— I closed the doors (every season is too full of longing!) and rechristened myself Flora. I drank a vat of rose water and put both my wrists through the slicer. And then I began to bleed—a white powder. Flour. And then you came in. I would have known you even if you were not wearing in your  buttonhole a carnation. The bakery is closed, I said tersely. I was bleeding profusely. I loved you even before you said Nothing breaks more slowly, more silently, than bread. With my blood pouring out as a fine, dry flour let me confess before I expire. There on the counter, in that vase fresh and pink is the corsage I was keeping for our dance.