517 Social commentaries poems

Leaving the beach on a Sunday in a streetcar a family of three—mother, son and daughter: the mother, well on in the thirties, blond hair, worried face; the son, twelve years of age or so, seated opposite, and the daughter, about eight or nine, beside her. The boy was blond, too; a good-looking little fellow with dreamy eyes. The little girl was quite plain; mouth pulled down at the corners, sharp angry eyes behind eyeglasses. No sooner were they seated than the boy, speaking gently, said, “Today was one of the most wonderful days I ever had.” The girl said shrilly, “I wish we could live in one of those houses”— looking at the bungalows along the shore— “then we could go to the beach every day.” The mother did not answer either. The beach they were coming from was crowded with poor people; and the family was dressed cheaply but was neat and spotless, even after the day’s outing. I wondered idly where the father was: at work? dead? divorced? After a while the mother said, weighing her words, “You know Mister. . .” I did not hear the name: it was spoken so softly. She was talking to the boy. “He goes fishing every Wednesday. I think I can get him to take you along.” The boy did not answer for a minute or two and then said, in his gentle voice, “I should like it very much.” “Can I go too?” asked the little girl shrilly, but no one answered her. Mother and son had eyes only for each other. She took out her handkerchief and wiped his face. He complained of something in his eye— certainly not enough to make him blink— and she raised the upper lid and lowered the lower lid to look for it. The little girl stood up to look out of the window and the boy said to his mother, “She stepped on my toes and did not even say, Excuse me, please.” The mother turned to the little girl and said sharply, “Why didn’t you say, Excuse me? You should have said, Excuse me, brother.” The little girl said nothing, face turned toward the window, the corners of her mouth far down and her eyes, bright and dry, looking sharply through her glasses.

for Cosetta Once there were coyotes, cardinals in the cedar. You could cure amnesia with the trees of our back-forty. Once I drowned in a monsoon of frogs— Grandma said it was a good thing, a promise for a good crop. Grandma’s perfect tomatoes. Squash. She taught us to shuck corn, laughing, never spoke about her childhood or the faces in gingerbread tins stacked in the closet. She was covered in a quilt, the Creek way. But I don’t know this kind of burial: vanishing toads, thinning pecan groves, peach trees choked by palms. New neighbors tossing clipped grass over our fence line, griping to the city of our overgrown fields. Grandma fell in love with a truck driver, grew watermelons by the pond on our Indian allotment, took us fishing for dragonflies. When the bulldozers came with their documents from the city and a truckload of pipelines, her shotgun was already loaded. Under the bent chestnut, the well where Cosetta’s husband hid his whiskey—buried beneath roots her bundle of beads.They tell the story of our family.

The Sangre de Cristo Mountains mottled as if with oil stains. Configurations of cloud-shadows. Easy gait of hours: a way through — or into — the dry winds. Our church is the mountains, says the guide to the tour group, all of whom have been instructed to keep their cameras inside their bags. 
A group crowding the aisles of San Geronimo Chapel. On the dirt path between adobe structures, bareheaded. Stretching, palms out, as steam from the boiling pot does. To move along the earth without keeping a ledger. The horsefly not so incongruous with the sagebrush. Still, reflexive swatting. We’re good citizens, we serve in the Army, though we’re regarded as second 
class by the US government. Framed badges and news stories in the house of the retired sheriff. Men in his family who have been policemen, firemen, soldiers. His wife pinching the ears of bear sculptures formed from mica clay. Thick paste of red soil and the piñon that pierces through it. To carry on from day to day without exercising the sloppy hand of 
manipulation. Four dollars for a plate of fry bread in cinnamon butter. The boy at the counter restless, wanting to get back to the electronic dance 
music on pause on his iPhone. Reading a history backward, the deep strata. Settling on this life as a parasite on its host. That man next door who you bought from? He sells jewelry made by an Anglo woman. His wife. The stray dog asleep on her side, dreams ripped from her open jaw. Money touched from hand to hand. Whole lifetimes spent trying to make sense of an appetite. A town called Tres Orejas.Three ears. Plenty.

The insane devotee throbs with his small legs, I don’t dare more. The insane devotee throbs with his small legs, I cannot do more. Bricks are yellow, made of polyvinyl, fattish. We people die.Lemme aks you, no l’s no r’s from the Japanese and Chinese, only the white mushroom, a cataract. Animals are prolific. You come from the valley, from your spine. From something more? From the risen sun. To smoke oneself on the roof. To change clothes and dry one’s hair in water lily.

After a morning of work in separate rooms she said she was going to the municipal pool and he said he would walk along the river for a while before they met back for their lunch of tomatoes and cheese. But in fact she went to the lobby of the Hotel du Panthéon to read the Herald Tribune and drink a cup ofnthe Irish tea she liked and he to the little church of St. Médard. A couple old women in housedresses knelt in the first pews. He sat in the back, with the drunks or alone. And at lunch she said terrible, the lanes were filled with kids from the elementary school or terrific, I had it to myself. And he said a barge full of oyster shells. Then quiet sex with the curtains drawn against the chemistry students conducting their experiments in the building across the street. Incremental triumphs of exactitude and necessity. In the evenings they liked to fire champagne corks over at the vast darkened laboratory windows. Imagining the mice startling in their cages, imagining catastrophe. Turning back to their tumors with relief.

You must laugh at yourself, laugh and laugh. Music swells the emotions; music exists to punctuate seeing. Emotion, therefore, is punctuation. Formless, freedom resembles abasement. Abasement is as infinite as desire. You must laugh at yourself, laugh and laugh. Those who are not demons are saints. You are not a demon or a saint. Women are small and want something, so laugh at yourself, laugh and laugh. Bed are sites of abasement. The news is about the news. Faces in close-up are always in anguish. Hair and teeth are clues to class. Clothes are changing, hanging up or down And change itself is a laugh. Cause can’t be figured and consequence is yet to come. You’re either awake or asleep and that, too, is a clue to class. Children are never with groups of children unless they are singing in chorus. Their mothers cannot do enough, though there’s always room for improvement. And improvement lies in progress, though collapsing is good for a laugh. Saints will turn to the worse. Demons die if they can be found. Nature is combat, weather is sublime. Even weather can make you laugh. People you don’t know are louder than you are, but what is far away cannot harm you— Books are objects, families are inspiring. Animals protect their young; the young come with the territory. English is the only language. Reading is an occasion for interruption, and interruption is a kind of laugh. Something is bound to get better. And there is a pill with your name on it. When indoors, stick with your own race— that way you’ll feel free to laugh. Strangers are paying attention to your smell. A camera will light like a moth on disaster. Pity will turn to irony. The street is a dark and frightful place. Fires are daily. Your car is your face. You must laugh at yourself, laugh and laugh.

Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free. (America never was America to me.) Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed— Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above. (It never was America to me.) O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe. (There's never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.") Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

after Neruda Go ahead, ask: where are the pomegranates, the dates, the girls with skin brown as hash, the hash? Listen to what’s happening One morning bonfires began to leap from the earth, devouring human beings, lit by matches flicked across the sky with joysticks. And from then on fire, from then on burning hair, from then on limbs and meat. Invisible bandits, pickpockets from ten-thousand feet, faceless, thoughtless, dumb except for humming, bandits marked with tiny flags, controlled from continents away by children, child bandits with letter jackets left hanging in their girlfriends' closets, child bandits with bibles thumbed and highlighted, spear missiles through the sky to kill other children and the blood of children runs through the streets, neither seen nor heard, obedient, simply, like children's blood. Ask away: why doesn’t his poetry describe our urban loneliness, the body drenched in metaphor? There’s nothing to see here, nothing to see, just blood in the sand, blood in the streets, nothing to see.

Let us consider the farmer who makes his straw hat his sweetheart; or the old woman who makes a floor lamp her son; or the young woman who has set herself the task of scraping her shadow off a wall.... Let us consider the old woman who wore smoked cows’ tongues for shoes and walked a meadow gathering cow chips in her apron; or a mirror grown dark with age that was given to a blind man who spent his nights looking into it, which saddened his mother, that her son should be so lost in vanity.... Let us consider the man who fried roses for his dinner, whose kitchen smelled like a burning rose garden; or the man who disguised himself as a moth and ate his overcoat, and for dessert served himself a chilled fedora....

A gunshot then. Stop your bikes and let them wobble in mechanism Then a gun watchman, hithered on the imaginary end of a macabre lipping telescope, broke my hero into speeches. It had to be masculine this many occasions consecutively and also diminutive from a hugeness I could not collect enough pipes and wizards on the trumpet trigger to build a trumpet or remorse or capitulate or boost my chest into order, for a basicness distortion gives, gives exegesis         Pedals coiling and scuffing the earth dust trusting lungs to come out in funicular or jigback. If I could just look to the minimalists, suss a sleek black wrist gathering the handles or clutching stacks of hourglass glasses to his grappling ribs at this one endless shop.    We looted