517 Social commentaries poems

In musty light, in the thin brown air of damp carpet, doll heads and rust, beneath long rows of sharp footfalls like nails in a lid, an old man stands trying on glasses, lifting each pair from the box like a glittering fish and holding it up to the light of a dirty bulb. Near him, a heap of enameled pans as white as skulls looms in the catacomb shadows, and old toilets with dry red throats cough up bouquets of curtain rods. You’ve seen him somewhere before. He’s wearing the green leisure suit you threw out with the garbage, and the Christmas tie you hated, and the ventilated wingtip shoes you found in your father’s closet and wore as a joke. And the glasses which finally fit him, through which he looks to see you looking back— two mirrors which flash and glance— are those through which one day you too will look down over the years, when you have grown old and thin and no longer particular, and the things you once thought you were rid of forever have taken you back in their arms.

Through the orange glow of taillights, I crossed the dirt road, entered the half-mile of darkness and owl screech, tangled briar and fallen trunk, followed the yellow beam of Billy Parker's flashlight down the slick needle-hill, half crawling, half sliding and kicking for footholds, tearing up whole handfuls of scrub brush and leaf mold until I jumped the mud bank, walked the ankle-deep creek, the last patch of pine, the gully, and knelt at the highway stretching in front of Billy Parker's house, spotted the black Chevy Camaro parked under a maple not fifty feet from the window where Billy Parker rocked in and out of view, studying in the bad light of a table lamp the fine print of his Allstate policy. I cut the flashlight, checked up and down the highway. Behind me the screech growing distant, fading into woods, but coming on a network of tree frogs signaling along the creek. Only that, and the quiet of my heels coming down on asphalt as I crossed the two-lane and stood at the weedy edge of Billy Parker's yard, stood in the lamp glare of the living room where plans were being made to make me rich and thought of a boat and Johnson outboard, of all the lures on a K-Mart wall, of reels and graphite rods, coolers of beer, weedy banks of dark fishy rivers, and of Billy Parker rocking in his chair, studying his coverage, his bank account, his layoff at Lockheed, his wife laboring in the maternity ward of the Cobb General Hospital. For all of this, I crouched in the shadow of fender and maple, popped the door on the Camaro, and found in the faint house-light drifting through the passenger's window the stripped wires hanging below the dash. I took the driver's seat, kicked the clutch, then eased again as I remembered the glove box and the pint of Seagram's Billy Parker had not broken the seal on. Like an alarm the tree frogs went off in the woods. I drank until they hushed and I could hear through cricket chatter the rockers on Billy Parker's chair grinding ridges into his living room floor, worry working on him like hard time. Then a wind working in river grass, a red current slicing around stumps and river snags, a boat-drift pulling against an anchor as I swayed in the seat of the black Camaro, grappled for the wires hanging in darkness between my knees, saw through the tinted windshield by a sudden white moon rolling out of the clouds, a riverbank two counties away, a place to jump and roll on the soft shoulder of the gravel road, a truck in a thicket a half-mile downstream.

The large man in the Budweiser tee with serpents twining on his arms has leukemia. It doesn’t seem right but they’ve told him he won’t die for years if he sticks with the treatment. He’s talking about his years in the foundry, running a crane on an overhead track in the mill. Eight hours a day moving ingots into rollers. Sometimes without a break because of the bother of getting down. Never had an accident. Never hurt anyone. He had that much control. His problem is that electricity arced through his body and accumulated. When he got down at the end of a shift he could squeeze a forty-watt light bulb between thumb and finger and make it flare. All the guys came around to see that.

Bungle is the password A slight matter of a deposit secures you the night's blank face on the large crude banknote I offer all the grease that's ever been on my palm as advice: Don't breathe in the lights of evening Moonshine hits the can bounces off and consumes the drapes I'm talking about here where we meet at the emergency water supply One man and one woman gets you one of each and some shadows A caress in the breeze A caress please so much? You can't even die without touching, you can't sweeten the fat street of faces without touch I don't retain the melody that set me, dressed as I am, in motion in marriage with myself It ain't no honeymoon to take off my breast and play it So it happens you notice me in my canary shorts and my crimson fez Twunk twunkity twunk My thumb piano, my very open eyes

My mother is dying of too much electricity on the brain, my father, a limp in his walk,& my macho lost his green card at a bus station. I want words split letter for letter to turn sound into wisdom on my losses. • My macho says:Your skin is the color of milk, you glow between sheets. ¿Who gives more light: me, or the luna lunera? Too much milk makes you sick — drink, drink, cascabelera. • I want to leave my hembra behind. ¿What are my options? She bleeds on the rug, births a litter, then hides limp bodies in kitchen cabinets. • I lied. My father is dying of too much electricity on the brain, my macho, a limp in his walk,& my mother lost her green card at a bus station. Who these losses happened to matter to no one but me. To others, my loss is only worth its sum parts. • I pour a shot to get the flies drunk. Watch their little legs stagger. I like the flies tipsy, like my macho likes me when I am glazed on the kitchen floor, begging him not to leave me. • Come kill me over the stove, under the running shower head, gravel my skin bloody. I am so afraid one night my macho will choke me to death, though I am not afraid of dying. • My macho says:Hembra, I imagine the woman I love when I’m with you, but you’re not that woman. I ask:Who is she? My macho says:Cállate, take off your dress. Each of   his fingers strokes death. I only want to die. So I die, una y otra vez.

He would have gone to Hell ageine, and earnest sute did make: But Charon would not suffer him to passe the Stygian lake. —Ovid, Metamorphoses (Tr. by Arthur Golding) Never mind phantom forms, the Keaton-crash that dumped us in that sea-fed swamp, the Dutch kill, Latin nihil, thing without opposite—attend instead the transcendent, the flying, for god’s sake, what we saw the moment before we thwocked overboard: a heron stutter-flapped and lifted off, clumsy as a wind-mauled tarp at first, but couth beyond sublime once clear of cattail punks and saltgrass tips, the overturned rowboat’s rusted hull. Or the cormorant that plunked and dipped, rose flipping fish from beak to tongue and down its neck, water beading on its head. But the crown that really pleased the crowd my maiden voyage was iridescent green, brilliantined, a merganser’s spiky coxcomb. He swam right by, chasing red herrings and cackling so happily I had to pull a feather from his cap. And so I surfaced solo. I tell myself, I only launch the bark, I never book the seats. I didn’t stop to spin the prop or wipe the rail, just tipped the motor up and paddle-poled, bottom- stirred. Rousted horseshoe crabs, sleeping ducks, cranky grebes, slapped along the little waves, the seeping tide, lonelier, sure, indignant, too—what better lover has plucked and boasted, over what better lyre? An open boat: it’s company, not coin, I want. I’ll tune the wake to silence, court grace, make change— still trading on the laughs I’ve jerry-rigged.

I am saying primroses lined the pathway of toothless hedges. I am saying the ocean shimmered like corrugated steel in the morning sun. The context of my story changes when you enter. Then I am dung on the wall of the nomad’s field. Then the everyday waking person. I am nodding in your direction like fissures between dandelion fur. Seeing in your manner. I am speaking your pace. Slippage of silk slippers. I say you are losing sight. I say your breasts are dry shells. I am afraid of what I am capable of doing. This is all a manner of stating how I prepare myself to be loved.

in the general conservative cast, overcome by lack of suicidal tendencies, in the worried beyond reason shaking dense under-growth invasion of deliberately callous vertebrates, hotheaded newagers paint possible minds dirtier than can be produced in a real whereabouts nonlocation location, crumbling in darkness. a breath away from my next instant self, knowing lies will flow from my lips as well as the rest; a creative fallacy to create that which we think we know, with a thousand pens ready to suggest what one should do. reminding myself, all ends with what effects it will have. reminding myself, all ends with what can be named and financed, so why not let my bones be picked by the ants. reminding myself, I would do anything to not remember who I resemble, I would do anything to not resemble who I resemble, to not resemble the resembled. reminding myself, I would do anything to not belong to a future human potential workshop, supported by a cast of thousands begging for all things mundane sanity brings, in general overcome by lack of suicidal tendencies.

Where do slackers go to get their jollies? Where do they spend hours every day? Where commit their most moronic follies? In the Grünewald Café. The dull-eyed types who sit alone? They're boozers Who dose their coffee with Grand Marnier. No one ever tells them they are losers In the Grünewald Café. You hadn't seen the mobster's girlfriend. Tasty, But are you sure her goon has gone away? It's not so wise to come on overhasty In the Grünewald Café. You sidle up and say, "Can I get you a drink?" She's shuffling cards and seems to want to play. A smile means "Try your luck, guy," don't you think, In the Grünewald Café? Card game done, why not get down to cases? Up close her blue-green eyes seem less blasé. All around you fools are pulling faces— In the Grünewald Café? Yet when your hands touch, someone taps your shoulder. It's the waiter: "Sorry. Care to pay?" A silence falls. Things suddenly feel colder In the Grünewald Café. The red-faced gangster, packing heat, approaches. A rod's blunt business end. You start to pray. What made you hang out here with all these roaches In the Grünewald Café? How brief it is, that fiery burst of thunder! Brief as life, brief as a winter day. To croak because you made a stupid blunder In the Grünewald Café! And now this floating view down from the ceiling: Blood soaks the spot where your dead body lay. What song, what words express all that you're feeling? In the Grünewald Café.

I Far-sighted into yesterday they stand, gripping their charters and speeches, the presidents and kings, masters of unconscious evil. Their deputies are here — judges, robed executioners, steely and triumphant. And stunned at their feet, the beheaded, the betrayed, healed and hallowed now in this grave sorrow of wax. II We enter, adjust to the gloom, to the lighting that plays on the painted, staring faces. We think to ourselves, murmur to the one standing beside us: "How compellingly strange these people are, and yet familiar to the world we left behind us, the street and the household..." These are the people whose names we learned, whose lives we studied, whose thoughts we have become. Each lighted stage with its play of the lost and the violent — comedians and stuntmen, heroes transfixed in purpose. We pause, to read once more, in deliberate, bald summation, what art, wax, and history have made of the dead: something more than a mirror, less than a telling likeness; an ideality slick with blood. III How easily in the live heat of truth and summer these actors wilt and perish. Henry of Church and England is here, savage and senile, still laced in his armor; his lopped and stunted wives stand grouped around him. Bismark in his iron corset, endlessly dividing Europe; Wilhelm, that struttng dwarf, abject in abdication. And here, the fatal mischief of Sarajevo — how swift a fire, how long a burning, came of the Archduke's festive ride, his shot and bloodied tunic. And no more telling prophecy in the wake of armistice than that one dated cartoon with its hooded sentry and its graveyard owl: "It has been six years..." How easily a puff of smoke, a square of burnt cloth, a shocked cry, can change the world, and leave it neither worse nor better. IV Here is a man, thief or martyr, hanged at Damascus Gate with a hook through his gut. He swung, seared by the sun and kissed by the night. And maybe one of the market women brought him water, and maybe not — once seen by the Sultan's watch, she might have lost her hands. As in the time of Richelieu, certain men the crown accused were exposed in iron baskets like plucked birds. They fouled their nests, starved and blackened until they died; and the city lived with their cries, their rank mortality, night and day. The hook is black and crescent, the body swings, inert, as if asleep and dreaming. The guidebook tells us the man survived his hook and lived; it doesn't say how long. V Here, with his tins and furs, is Minuit, buying Manhattan. We see the Dutchman's flourish, the Indians' foolish feathers. He takes their land, and they his bitter gifts, his brass and trinkets — so little cash in place of an earthy kingdom. Wolfe, Montcalm, on the plain below Quebec: the one dying, the other condemned to follow. We pass, reading from face to face, from book to book, uneasy that among these celebrations so many rigged transactions have gone unquestioned. And all our wigged colonials, our Franklins, conspiring with their strongbox keys and profitable lightning — that so much ink and dust and shuffled paper conceals their tidy pilferings, their purity and blunted wrath. Were there rooms in this house, each with its tabled motions and false partitions might furnish a history, one slow truth at a time. But never in our late arrival have we stilled confusion, to learn how great a folly follows in the wake of fathers. From their deliberate violence we come to our own lamed misrule, its slick banality and crime without passion. To Ike, to Kennedy and Ford, golfers and temporizers; to perennial candidate Nixon, whose cheek was never turned. Out of his sleek arrest he steps towards us, as if to greet a voter — a fixed, ferocious smile on the blue jowls brushed with powder. VI Nothing we have painted and framed in our passage — neither prayer nor courtship, nor solace of sleep and self — escaped the grip of these iron centuries. Here, in a row of lighted cases, a few artifacts are on display. No comfort to us now in that familiar, edged interrogation... But the biting persuasion of chains and collars, of inching racks, fire tongs and screws — in the eyes of kings and churchmen the instruments of truth. And whosoever might trespass, on whatever lawful ground, would find for his solace a more forbidding marriage. As once in a stone embrasure I saw a belt for virgins, a hinged and rusted clasp, with a lock, and a slit for functions — all but one. Imagine with what shocked dismay a man might grope for his sweetness there, and all too soon awaken, clamped in his ecstasy. VII Another room, with smaller people and thinner walls. Here the Queen plays with cryptic cards, hands out assignments: "You are the Hunchback," she says, "and You the Hangman, and You the Jack of Trades." She pares and quarters her venomous apple, calls for her mirror, and her image smiles to watch her glass fill up with poison. Beauty is sleeping, the Prince is awake, and far in the forest a frostlight winks from the Sugar House. The Witch is singing and lighting her oven. The Woodcutter's wayward children watch, they break and nibble the sweetened glass. The images whisper and darken, conspiring in their tumbled tale of fretful spinners, of drones and dumble- dores, wise eggs that speak and shatter. And it looks as if the painted sleepers in this dreamworks are about to awaken: the crafty Queen and her players, the musical mice, the drones and the spinners — All in a scampering rush, to find the nearest exit... As the looking glass draws us deeper into the bright play of shadows that melt and run and freeze... The mad, mad romp of children, of rabbits and dwarfs, who keep their strange hilarity in so much horror. VIII Call those from underneath, the sold and trodden, their slow and sweating sons, elevate and crown them. Patch up their clothing and wash their skins, rub their faces until they glow, and their dull eyes brighten. Give them speeches to learn, and eloquent gestures, power to grasp, laws to break and mend. Great heat and furious labor bring on in them this drear and mystical change: At first a swinish fattening, and then a leaner look, and in their eyes the same feral glitter of their late unkindly masters. They sicken as they flourish, until like wickless candles they slump and totter; their heads are rotten, their famous flesh has run to sticky pools. They die and sleep afoot, their ignorant hearts grown wise in the ways of wax. IX In all these wax memorials only appearance changes. Crowned heads and axes fall, thugs and jailors rise and displace each other in this long, uneasy walk we have littered with claims and captions. The heroes are always welcomed, are propped and shaven, their ruddy male composure is sleeker than ever, though the great sleeves and brutal collars give way to softer buttons. The paper in official hands rustles as before, though it is only paper, paper in cheap supply, and not the bleached fell of a difficult sheep. And yet the neat persuasions are seen to tighten, and each new litigation is a running noose... All that increases, all that gluts and fattens, matures its option here: Honor to thieves and merchants, long life to the butcher. And for the just petitioner — sweeper of the hallways, scapegoat and discard — no reply but the rote of legal fictions; to which he listens, now as in the days of Pontinus, stricken with understanding. X The rooms are large and numerous, and we in our restless striding find that they never end. It is as if we had lived here always, captive to this endless and malign instruction; had served those mighty tempers, and learned too well these never-blotted names. And we live here still, sharing these murderous spaces, this blood-haunted silence. And once we started from sleep, terrorized and whimpering, to see in the luminous, sunken light, the head of a long-forgotten agent: a face like a father, one who might have comforted, but cannot see or hear us: bald, vacant, and amused. XI All is as it must or might be, here at the story's end — the jury dismissed, the witness excused, and all are guilty. To have come so far, walked so easily through so much anguish, pride, and stupor of evil, and yet we are standing still, locked in an echoing foyer. In so driven, so brief an itinerary, a day will stand for a decade, an inch for a mile — so far has a painted fiction served us. These bones in their period costumes would bend if we touched them; their flesh would yield, and all arrangements topple. But see how they bring toward us the old, sustaining gestures — a stride, an arm outstretched — the furrows in the smiles deepen, and the red lips smear. Great captains command, obedient ranks go down. In all these propped assemblies I know a substance neither wax nor wholly flesh — a tried and mortal nature, familiar as the warmth in my hand. XII Were we not lost, condemned to repeat these names and to honor their crimes, a voice among us might cry out, speak to those who are stopped here: Whose faces are these that melt and run? Children and guardians, giants and dwarfs — Oh, people, people... Who are these heroes and where are their victims? We who are standing here with our guidebooks suddenly closed and all the exits darkened... Until another gallery opens, or the sun through that skylight strikes us all — souls in torment, pilgrims and doting fathers...