517 Social commentaries poems

I heard from people after the shootings. People I knew well or barely or not at all. Largely the same message: how horrible it was, how little there was to say about how horrible it was. People wrote, called, mostly e-mailed because they know I teach at Virginia Tech, to say, there’s nothing to say. Eventually I answered these messages: there’s nothing to say back except of course there’s nothing to say, thank you for your willingness to say it. Because this was about nothing. A boy who felt that he was nothing, who erased and entered that erasure, and guns that are good for nothing, and talk of guns that is good for nothing, and spring that is good for flowers, and Jesus for some, and scotch for others, and “and” for me in this poem, “and” that is good for sewing the minutes together, which otherwise go about going away, bereft of us and us of them. Like a scarf left on a train and nothing like a scarf left on a train. As if the train, empty of everything but a scarf, still opens its doors at every stop, because this is what a train does, this is what a man does with his hand on a lever, because otherwise, why the lever, why the hand, and then it was over, and then it had just begun.

In the middle of this century we turned to each other With half faces and full eyes like an ancient Egyptian picture And for a short while. I stroked your hair In the opposite direction to your journey, We called to each other, Like calling out the names of towns Where nobody stops Along the route. Lovely is the world rising early to evil, Lovely is the world falling asleep to sin and pity, In the mingling of ourselves, you and I, Lovely is the world. The earth drinks men and their loves Like wine, To forget. It can't. And like the contours of the Judean hills, We shall never find peace. In the middle of this century we turned to each other, I saw your body, throwing shade, waiting for me, The leather straps for a long journey Already tightening across my chest. I spoke in praise of your mortal hips, You spoke in praise of my passing face, I stroked your hair in the direction of your journey, I touched your flesh, prophet of your end, I touched your hand which has never slept, I touched your mouth which may yet sing. Dust from the desert covered the table At which we did not eat But with my finger I wrote on it The letters of your name.

I would drive the pre-dawn dark to stake my spot to fish for dinner, to numb my hands in the ice bucket, to pluck, from the neat stack, a herring, to fit the skullcap and pierce the eye with a toothpick, the body double-hooked, my fingertips glimmering with the scales of the dead while the line whined free from the reel, and the bait arced out over the tidal current on a point in view of   the town where I lived, where I had become a man with no money, suddenly concerned only with money, for there were mouths and I had helped to make them — The eddy swirled, kept my line taut, my whole body taut though a man a few down the row laughed, sitting back on his bucket while he pulled in more fish than he could take. I hated the other men, hated the ones who caught nothing, who crossed lines or hooked gulls, who plucked even birds from the sky and slowly drew them in while they struggled and looked away, even, finally, in the hands of the man who only wanted them free. I climbed the breakwater and fished and spoke to no one. I baited my line and thought of a woman who would carry my body over the threshold of our small white house simply with her eyes because I had brought something home, for her, for us, our boys at my side while one fish was divided and indeed did feed many — (Now to sift the facts for truth): I reeked of   the sea and had nothing to show for it. Darkling saltwater for a dream and no other place to be.

The economical ikebana of the lesser octopus is disarming, a sextopus, holding its intelligence & ink in a concentrate. Not some sloppy octopus who suddenly freaks, so princessy, rich. Driven to abstraction not unlike flowers dropping their petals because petals are garbage off the bloom, not expensive anymore thus going inside to find meaning. Cut the eyes, then, from the cruel ikebana of the racehorse— if a leg breaks she can't bear her own weight, long-blossomed head turns to glue and the fortune zooms off like flies from a carcass when shooed. The tripod fell so I had to cast about for my crutch to walk over—my bad left knee buckling— to right it. I want to take a picture of the flowers I arranged after an ikebana class, just one. I quit quickly but still hope to learn to arrange beauty classically. Maybe I'm lazy, or don't apply the rules to myself, or maybe "laze" is just "zeal" rearranged, as in my case. Even now, the clock we need to punch out on is too far away to plug in, so power collects in its hands.

for Louis Asekoff Mid-October, Massachusetts. We drive through the livid innards of a beast—dragon or salamander—whose home is fire. The hills a witch’s quilt of goldrust, flushed cinnamon, wine fever, hectic lemon. After dark, while water ruffles, salted, in a big pot, we four gather towards the woodfire, exchanging lazy sentences, waiting dinner. Sunk in the supermarket cardboard box, the four lobsters tip and coolly stroke each other with rockblue baton legs and tentative antennae, their breath a wet clicking, the undulant slow shift of their plated bodies like the doped drift of patients in the padded ward. Eyes like squished berries out on stalks. It’s the end of the line for them, yet faintly in that close-companioned air they smell the sea, a shadow-haunted hole to hide in till all this blows over. When it’s time, we turn the music up to nerve us to it, then take them one by one and drop in the salty roil and scald, then clamp the big lid back. Grasping the shapely fantail, I plunge mine in headfirst and feel before I can detach myself the flat slap of a jackknifed back, glimpse for an instant before I put the lid on it the rigid backward bow-bend of the whole body as the brain explodes and lidless eyes sear white. We two are bound in silence till the pot-lid planks back and music floods again, like a tide. Minutes later, the four of us bend to brittle pink intricate shells, drawing white sweet flesh with our fingers, sewing our shroud-talk tight about us. Later, near moonless midnight, when I scrape the leafbright broken remains into the garbage can outside, that last knowing spasm eels up my arm again and off, like a flash, across the rueful stars.

We tell the story every year— how we peered from the windows, shades drawn— though nothing really happened, the charred grass now green again. We peered from the windows, shades drawn, at the cross trussed like a Christmas tree, the charred grass still green. Then we darkened our rooms, lit the hurricane lamps. At the cross trussed like a Christmas tree, a few men gathered, white as angels in their gowns. We darkened our rooms and lit hurricane lamps, the wicks trembling in their fonts of oil. It seemed the angels had gathered, white men in their gowns. When they were done, they left quietly. No one came. The wicks trembled all night in their fonts of oil; by morning the flames had all dimmed. When they were done, the men left quietly. No one came. Nothing really happened. By morning all the flames had dimmed. We tell the story every year.

I was listening for the dog when the locks were pried open. The man was dead. The dog, a survivor, was dead. It happens more often this way. A disease left untreated; the body, in confusion, gives in. The bomb breathes its fire down the hallway, the son comes back in pieces; the body, in confusion, gives in. The grief is a planet. A dust ring. A small moon that’s been hidden under my pillow, that’s been changing the way my body moves this whole time.

Forty degrees; the threat of rain. That time of fall When we are most inclined to end it all. Denim-jacketed, with a faded sweatshirt hood, He draws his plane along a length of wood, Then takes a chisel to a cornice piece With two light taps. His movements never cease; His cracked and callused hands, in gloves with fingers cut, Rub up for warmth, then start like hares hawked by his thought. He knows no other work; wants none. He learned this from His father—brace and auger, bob and plumb— The same way he learned how to hunt or take a beating: Not by words but by a look, and by repeating Mutely each grimace, wince, set of the jaw. His job is more than workmanlike. No flaw Or gap offends the eye. Each post and bull-nose stair Seems proof of love—if love is proved by excess care.

It’s spring in 1827, Beethoven hoists his death-mask and sails off. The grindstones are turning in Europe’s windmills. The wild geese are flying northwards. Here is the north, here is Stockholm swimming palaces and hovels. The logs in the royal fireplace collapse from Attention to At Ease. Peace prevails, vaccine and potatoes, but the city wells breathe heavily. Privy barrels in sedan chairs like paschas are carried by night over the North Bridge. The cobblestones make them stagger mamselles loafers gentlemen. Implacably still, the sign-board with the smoking blackamoor. So many islands, so much rowing with invisible oars against the current! The channels open up, April May and sweet honey dribbling June. The heat reaches islands far out. The village doors are open, except one. The snake-clock’s pointer licks the silence. The rock slopes glow with geology’s patience. It happened like this, or almost. It is an obscure family tale about Erik, done down by a curse disabled by a bullet through the soul. He went to town, met an enemy and sailed home sick and grey. Keeps to his bed all that summer. The tools on the wall are in mourning. He lies awake, hears the woolly flutter of night moths, his moonlight comrades. His strength ebbs out, he pushes in vain against the iron-bound tomorrow. And the God of the depths cries out of the depths ‘Deliver me! Deliver yourself!’ All the surface action turns inwards. He’s taken apart, put together. The wind rises and the wild rose bushes catch on the fleeing light. The future opens, he looks into the self-rotating kaleidoscope sees indistinct fluttering faces family faces not yet born. By mistake his gaze strikes me as I walk around here in Washington among grandiose houses where only every second column bears weight. White buildings in crematorium style where the dream of the poor turns to ash. The gentle downward slope gets steeper and imperceptibly becomes an abyss.

The city had such pretty clotheslines. Women aired their intimate apparel in the emery haze: membranes of lingerie— pearl, ruby, copper slips— their somehow intestinal quivering in the wind. And Freihofer’s spread the chaste, apron scent of baking, a sensual net over a few yards of North Troy. The city had Niagara Mohawk bearing down with power and light and members of the Local shifting on the line. They worked on fabrics made from wood and acid, synthetics that won’t vent. They pieced the tropics into housecoats when big prints were the rage. Dacron gardens twisted on the line over lots of Queen Anne’s lace. Sackdresses dyed the sun as sun passed through, making a brash stained glass against the leading of the tenements, the warehouse holding medical supplies. I waited for my bus by that window of trusses in Caucasian beige, trying to forget the pathological inside. I was thinking of being alive. I was waiting to open the amber envelopes of mail at home. Just as food service workers, counter women, maybe my Aunt Fran, waited to undo their perms from the delicate insect meshes required by The Board of Health. Aunt Alice wasn’t on this route. She made brushes and plastics at Tek Hughes— milk crates of orange industrial lace the cartons could drip through. Once we boarded, the girls from Behr-Manning put their veins up and sawed their nails to dust on files from the plant. All day, they made abrasives. Garnet paper. Yes, and rags covered with crushed gems called garnet cloth. It was dusk—when aunts and mothers formed their larval curls and wrapped their heads in thick brown webs. It was yesterday—twenty years after my father’s death, I found something he had kept. A packet of lightning- cut sanding discs, still sealed. I guess he meant to open the finish, strip the paint stalled on some grain and groom the primal gold. The discs are the rough size of those cookies the franchises call Homestyle and label Best Before. The old cellophane was tough. But I ripped until I touched their harsh done crust.