517 Social commentaries poems

The natives here enjoy a delicate and tense society. Their upper classes make an art of conversation so refined that no Caucasian ever participates without making at least one outrageous faux pas. Few Europeans, in fact, can manage even the rudiments of this language, which consists of vowels only, and, although several grammars have been composed by reputable scholars, these disagree on every major point of syntax. The chieftains are invariably stout: a proverb says “Fat men must be sure; doubt and misgivings need agility.” The special term for this is rendered as “complacency” in all the lexicons, but is in no wise derogatory.

It's been a while since they asked, Who lives in between these houses, And who was he, the last of the last to speak, And who forgot his coat between these houses, And who was the one who stayed. Why didn't he flee? Among the blossomers, a dead tree stands, dead tree. A long-standing error, a misunderstanding of yore, The edge of the Land, where an era begins to be For somebody else. A bit of stillness there. And the current events of body and of hell, The reeds of the end, their spells of sway and sough. The wind passed on its way through that locale And a serious dog saw the humans laugh.

Poem for Sriram Shamasunder And All of Poetry for the People It’s a sunlit morning with jasmine blooming easily and a drove of robin redbreasts diving into the ivy covering what used to be a backyard fence or doves shoving aside the birch tree leaves when a young man walks among the flowers to my doorway where he knocks then stands still brilliant in a clean white shirt He lifts a soft fist to that door and knocks again He’s come to say this was or that was not and what’s anyone of us to do about what’s done what’s past but prickling salt to sting our eyes What’s anyone of us to do about what’s done And 7-month-old Bingo puppy leaps and hits that clean white shirt with muddy paw prints here and here and there And what’s anyone of us to do about what’s done I say I’ll wash the shirt no problem two times through the delicate blue cycle of an old machine the shirt spins in the soapy suds and spins in rinse and spins and spins out dry not clean still marked by accidents by energy of whatever serious or trifling cause the shirt stays dirty from that puppy’s paws I take that fine white shirt from India the threads as soft as baby fingers weaving them together and I wash that shirt between between the knuckles of my own two hands I scrub and rub that shirt to take the dirty markings out At the pocket and around the shoulder seam and on both sleeves the dirt the paw prints tantalize my soap my water my sweat equity invested in the restoration of a clean white shirt And on the eleventh try I see no more no anything unfortunate no dirt I hold the limp fine cloth between the faucet stream of water as transparent as a wish the moon stayed out all day How small it has become! That clean white shirt! How delicate! How slight! How like a soft fist knocking on my door! And now I hang the shirt to dry as slowly as it needs the air to work its way with everything It’s clean. A clean white shirt nobody wanted to spoil or soil that shirt much cleaner now but also not the same as the first before that shirt got hit got hurt not perfect anymore just beautiful a clean white shirt It’s hard to keep a clean shirt clean.

Everyone wants to write about god but no one wants to imagine their god as the finger trembling inside a grenade pin’s ring or the red vine of blood coughed into a child’s palm while they cradle the head of a dying parent. Few things are more dangerous than a man who is capable of dividing himself into several men, each of them with a unique river of desire on their tongues. It is also magic to pray for a daughter and find yourself with an endless march of boys who all have the smile of a motherfucker who wronged you and never apologized. No one wants to imagine their god as the knuckles cracking on a father watching their son picking a good switch from the tree and certainly no one wants to imagine their god as the tree. Enough with the foolishness of hope and how it bruises the walls of a home where two people sit, stubbornly in love with the idea of staying. If one must pray, I imagine it is most worthwhile to pray towards endings. The only difference between sunsets and funerals is whether or not a town mistakes the howls of a crying woman for madness.

It’s the little towns I like with their little mills making ratchets and stanchions, elastic web, spindles, you name it. I like them in New England, America, particularly-providing bad jobs good enough to live on, to live in families even: kindergarten, church suppers, beach umbrellas ... The towns are real, so fragile in their loneliness a flood could come along (and floods have) and cut them in two, in half. There is no mayor, the town council’s not prepared for this, three of the four policemen are stranded on their roofs ... and it doesn’t stop raining. The mountain is so thick with water parts of it just slide down on the heifers—soggy, suicidal— in the pastures below. It rains, it rains in these towns and, because there’s no other way, your father gets in a rowboat so he can go to work.

I don’t mind the ring roads or the strange intersections, filled in with radio music    tarmac skirting streetlight and         the dissolving      moon. Wing mirrors tell of running trees. My heart races in the heave of the wind. In the pivot of glass everything is so small and manageable. I think of an old song, of purple cows in far fields, I wonder what it’d take to cover miles and miles with no maps or destination. It is not easy anymore to forget or be free of the bear that roams the place where I come from.

The farmhouses north of Driggs, silos for miles along the road saying BUTLER or SIOUX. The light saying rain coming on, the wind not up yet, animals waiting as the front hits everything on the high fiats, hailstones bouncing like rabbits under the sage. Nothing running off. Creeks clear. The river itself a shallow, straight shoot to the north, its rocks mossy, slick above the few deep pockets. On another drainage, the O-T-O. Loose stands of aspen on the slopes. Dude cabins, their porches and split-log loveseats, dull yellow curtains slapping over the open sills. From Emigrant north to the Great Bend, loaves of haystacks, stud farms, charolais, steel flumes between the ditches. Access to the river’s acreage closed to its whole length, the county roads dusty, turning onto the high shelves of side valleys. Scattered shacks and corrals. An old homestead, the sod roof rotting out its timbers. Below the spurs from the higher range, basins in the mountain pastures fill with odd water. The henbane dries. Ruts cross in the grass at a schoolhouse. Each runnel mixing where it can the spring creeks deepen and go on easily, swelling to the larger tributary with its pools and banks. At any bend the willows bend too, and gravel bars on the other shore flare into the shallows. An encampment. Ponies wade to their knees and drink, raising up now and then to look out through the smoke to the near hills, the one plateau heading off beyond the Crazies and the Little Belts, north. It strikes the river at the Gates, the water piling through its broad course, level, ridges and the vertical faces of bluffs crowding to each side. This rock is of an excellent grit for whetstones, hard and sharp. There is here more timber than below the falls. A spring immensely clear and of a bluish cast boils up near its center with such force that its surface in that part is strangely higher than the surrounding earth. I heard today a noise resembling the discharge of a piece of ordnance. Unless it be the bursting of the rich mines of silver in these mountains, I am at a loss to account for it. As the passages about the falls are narrow and steep, and as the buffalo travel to the river in great herds, the hinder part presses those in front out of their depth to the strong current. Their carcasses by the hundreds litter the shore below the cataracts. We have made of the mast of the pirogue two axletrees. Walked ahead to my first view of the falls, hearing them from afar. Their spray is scarcely formed when bodies of the same beaten water thrust over and down, concealing every shape, their whiteness alone visible. We will leave at this place all heavy baggage, the red pirogue, and whatever provisions we can do without. Needing a cellar for the caching of our stores we set hands to digging. More white bear. These fellows leave a formidable impression in the mud or sand. Goodrich, who is remarkably fond of fishing, caught many trout of two different species. Came to in a handsome timbered bottom across from the entrance of a very considerable river. Its character is so precisely that of the one below that the party with few exceptions has pronounced it the Missouri. The fork to the south is perfectly transparent, runs rapidly with an even, unriffled surface. Its bed is composed of round, smooth stones like those of rivers issuing from a mountainous country. If this latter be the one we are to take we should encounter within 50 miles a series of precipitous falls. There is now no timber on the hills. The black rock has given place to a yellow and brown or black clay, brown and yellowish white sandstone and a hard, dark freestone. It rises from the water abruptly on both sides in varied walls. I could discover above their horizon only the most elevated points. The river retains both its whitish color and a proportion of its sediment, but it is much clearer than below. The banks afforded us good towing. This method of ascending the river is the safest and most expeditious. We pass a great number of dry streambeds. These plains being level and wholly destitute of timber, the wind blows violently with its loads of sand. Driftwood comes down as the water rises. The banks are falling in very fast and I wonder that our pirogues are not swallowed by them. Wild hyssop grows here. A few cottonwood along the verges. Undergrowths of rose and serviceberry, and small-leafed willow on the sandbars. Met this evening the famous white bear. I had rather deal with several indians than with this gentleman. Much less ice running in the river. We make ready to set out, the party in general good health except for a few venereal complaints. A windy, blustering day. Our two pirogues still frozen. I draw a connection of the country from the information of traders. The falls are about 800 miles west. Rose early and commenced roofing the two wings of huts. Our situation sandy. Cottonwood and elm, some small ash. We must now settle for the winter. Very cold. Hard frosts. The river falling. For several days we pass deserted Mandan villages along both banks. The beaver and otter are becoming more abundant. We put ashore at noon, setting fire to the prairies to signal that we wish council with the natives. These Arikara much reduced by pox. It is customary for their nation to show its grief by pain, some cutting off two smaller fingers at the second joint. The earth of the plains is in many places opened in long crevices, its soil indifferent and with a kind of timothy branching like flax from its main stalk. Delayed here today so as to take equal altitudes, the weights of the waters of the two rivers, their specific gravities. As we near the great Platte, the sandbars are more numerous, sawyers worse than they were below. Mulberry, oak and walnut. These prairies from the river have very much the appearance of farms. We continue to pole our way upstream. Nothwithstanding our precautions, we struck a bar and were near turning over. The sergeants are directed each to keep a journal of all passing occurrences and such other descriptions of the country as shall seem to them worthy of notice. Our hunters report deer in every copse. I got out and walked for one mile through a rush bottom, nettles as high as my breast. All the forepart of the day we were arranging our company and taking on those articles we will need. St. Charles. The men spent their last night agreeably, dancing with the French ladies, &c. My ride was on a road finely shaded, with now and then a good farm. The corn in tassel, its leaves of a deep rich green bending at the ends by their own weight. Wheat and oat stubble. A hilly country. I passed a toll-gate, and, looking back, had my last view of the town’s steeples. From the state house cupola I could count the buildings, the number of which was ninety. A wooden bridge crosses the river just below the town. Men were engaged in racing their horses. I sought lodging and was shown to bed in a large barrack where a man and wife conversed with me until I feigned sleep. This is a post town, the mails arriving from both east and west on Wednesdays and Saturdays. A young woman gave me directions from an upstairs window. I descended the hill into Frankfort. There has lately been established a large manufactory for spinning hemp and flax. It is wrought by water and keeps in motion 1200 spindles. The streets of Lexington cross at right angles, its stores filled both with imports and with local goods: fine cutlery, tin ware, muslins and nankeens. I was so well put up that a man would be fastidious to a fault to have found the least thing wanting. Approaching the city the land changed steadily for the better, no longer broken, as to the eastward, but fine extensive levels and slopes, the road very wide, with grazing parks, meadows, and every spot cultivated. The farms hereabout have generally good and spacious stone barns, a few acres cleared but for those stumps or girdled trees still standing. The neighbors found last year a human jawbone, rough and honeycombed. My wagoner arrived this afternoon and went on, appointing to be in Louisville before me. I pass a house with small turrets at its corners, lawns, the whole needing only vineyards for the look of villas in Provence and Languedoc. Noticed along the banks of the Holston phlox with white flowers and phlox with pink flowers, two different species, very small phlox with lance-shaped leaves. Where I come in from Abingdon, the Kentucky road divides, the other fork for Burke courthouse. With nothing to do I make ink from gall nuts. More opossum taken in the woods. This animal’s greatest peculiarity is the false belly of the female. She can draw the slit so close that one must look narrowly to find it if she be virgin. The air clearing this morning, I was surprised with a full prospect of mountains. This river where we leave off is 240 miles distant in a straight line from Currituck Inlet. The turkey-cocks begin to gobble, which is the language wherein they make love. We have a dreamer of dreams among us who warned me in the morning to take care that I not fall into the creek. I thanked him and used what caution I could, but my horse made a false leap and laid me down in the water at my full length. The sky at sunset had a swept look. There was risk of our dining with St. Anthony when one indian knocked down a fat bear. Of the stem of the silk-grass their women make small aprons which they wear for decency. They put these on with so much art that their most negligent postures reveal nothing to our curiosity. The ruffles of some of our fellows were a little discolored by the bloodroot which these ladies use to improve their charms. Bear, it would seem, is no diet for saints, for it is apt to make them too rampant. At night, the surveyors took advantage of a clear sky. This trial of our variance shows it still something less then 3 degrees, so it remains much as we had found it at the sea. We have now run the poles beyond those inhabitants most inland. There fell a sort of Scots mist all the way. I have learned how rattlesnakes take a squirrel. They ogle the poor beast till by force of charm it falls down stupefied and senseless. The snake approaches it and moistens first one ear and then the other with his spittle, making the head all slippery. When that is done he draws this member into his mouth, and after it, by casual degrees, all the rest of the body. I am not so rigid an observer of the Sabbath as to allow of no journeys to be taken upon it. Nor would I care, like a certain New England magistrate, to order a man to the whipping post for daring to ride for a midwife on the Lord’s Day. And yet we found plainly that travelling on the Sunday had not thriven with us in the least. The rain was enlivened with loud thunder, and there is something in the woods that makes this sound more awful, the violence of the lightning more visible as the trees are shivered quite to the root. This Great Dismal Swamp is the source of five several rivers. We run our line to its skirts, which begin with dwarf reeds, moist uneven ground. The season inclining us to aguish distempers, we were suffered by the resident to cut up wood for firing, drive away the damps. At the bottom of the account Mankind are great losers by the luxuries of feather beds and warm apartments. We perceive our appetites to mend, and though we have to drink only what Adam had in Paradise, that stream of life runs cool and peaceably in our veins. The days are hard. Our slumbers sweeten, and if ever we dream of women they are kind. I delight to see the banks of the Inlet adorned with myrtle, yet it must be owned that, sacred to Venus though it be, this plant grows commonly in very dirty soil. Norfolk has most the air of a town of any in Virginia. There are now riding at her wharves near 20 brigantines. The trade hither is engrossed by those saints of New England who every week carry off a pretty deal of tobacco. I have found that after my devotions a walk in the garden can do much to fill my heart with clear obedience. I repair me there that I might think deeply of the earth and how it will be all too soon my sleeping-place. For I am told to fear such things as bring me to ill terms, told of those who seek congress with the earth that they shall have her in their time forever. That her places sing their love-songs for no man. That I am not the suitor whose betrothed awaits him, but some unwelcome third with God alone her lover. And yet I would look upon such country as will show me nature undressed, the strata of the land, her lays and beds and all her privacies. For my wonder tells me I should be promiscuous, should learn by all the laws of bodies and by where they are the joyful news out of the new found world. This walk is news. Its bodies point me always in and out along some newer course. There have been divers days together wherein alone I’ve watched these flowers buoyed on their stems and holding up the sun. Just now I catch them thinking on themselves, composing from their dark places the least passages for light, tendering how they look and how I look on them. It comes to me that the world is to the end of it thinking on itself and how its parts gather with one another for their time. These are the light, and all the forms they show are lords of inns wherein the soul takes rest. If I could find it in myself to hide the world within the world then there would be no place to which I could remove it, save that brightness wherein all things come to see.

for E. A. Vulnerable therein & perfectly relinquished by stasis, object always of my natal, crepuscular desire, into the translucent specter, body’s blue fossil of ice, never autochthonous, still embarked upon the imperative passage to get there, to secure a geography that will beg description, narrative map, adopted tentatively; if only to write the ritual book of what was possible, but never bound to occur.

After Ernesto Trejo And the morning’s marine layer cloud cover’s   just beginning to unhinge, to let the buttery light of another daybreak slip through And weigh down the dead lawns and sagging rooftops of  this neighborhood, where Cold War era television antennas Still cast shadows like B-52s heading offshore, where poverty, this early is the smell of  Malt-O-Meal and the dregs of  thin beer Washed down the sink. Where the shift begins at 7AM, but consciousness has a way of coming round as slowly As this old computer monitor flickers its dull sixteen colors into being. On it, the names and numbers of  laundromat and liquor store owners, Fast food managers and lawn care companies; it’s my job to cold call them, read from a script on the benefits of membership In the Executive Dining Club, not take No for an answer. I’m no good and both the boss and I know it, and he’s hovering When the scraped-out voice of  the woman on my phone answers me with My husband’s been killed, and then, instead of  hanging up, Throws the receiver down next to something — dishwasher or window AC, I don’t know — but something close, it sounds, to tearing itself  apart, Something cycling through an awful, screeching noise. And it’s because I’ve paused that the boss flings a pencil Into the wall in front of  me and edges closer, and because of  the fear of  unemployment forms or the sky opening up if  I were to walk out, And because this sound — the un-oiled, flak-fouled crack of  it — has left me standing suddenly at the end of a runway, planes Screaming low overhead and loaded for the beginning of  the end of the world, that I start back into the script, start back as if  I believe each word, Even though, in the rattle and dust of  the jet-wash, no one hears a thing.

Sometimes after hours of wine I can almost see the night gliding in low off the harbor down the long avenues of shop windows past mannequins, perfect in their gestures. I leave some water steaming on the gas ring and sometimes I can slip from my body, almost find the single word to prevent evenings that absolve nothing, a winter lived alone and cold. Rooms where you somehow marry the losses of strangers that tremble on the walls like the hands of the dancer next door, luminous with Methedrine, she taps walls for hours murmuring about the silver she swears lines the building, the hallways where each night drunks stammer their usual rosary until they come to rest beneath the tarnished numbers, the bulbs that star each ceiling. I must tell you I am afraid to sit here losing myself to the hour’s slow erasure until I know myself only by this cold weight, this hand on my lap, palm up. I want to still the dancer’s hands in mine, to talk about forgiveness and what we leave behind—faces and cities, the small emergencies of nights. I say nothing, but leaning on the sill, I watch her leave at that moment when the first taxis start rolling to the lights of Chinatown, powered by sad and human desire. I watch her fade down the street until she’s a smudge, violent in the circle of my breath. A figure so small I could cup her in my hands.