517 Social commentaries poems

Knots, a thousand lights, in sheer dark, aimed at my window, tinny crystals, so mother dies in my sleep. The snow turns coarse, goes out. An axe sounds where I'd never heard an axe before. Breathing becomes dangerous. I can't help it, making me her, even before I was born, her brain burning out patterns I follow like will o' the wisps, sparks popping. I put on heels and find I can balance, twist my spine, bend to get my seams straight on my own, no one to call on, like she called me, sheer nylon turning on sheer skin under my palms. I pull on the ratty musquash coat. I have the body. I move off in it, eddying, trying to see who I am now. I totter down the street thinking, one day he'll be sorry. And here I am. Sorry. I watch her getting smaller up the road. I watch us both, till nothing's all there is.

1 Eastern guard tower glints in sunset; convicts rest like lizards on rocks. 2 The piano man is stingy, at 3 A.M. his songs drop like plum. 3 Morning sun slants cell. Drunks stagger like cripple flies On jailhouse floor. 4 To write a blues song is to regiment riots and pluck gems from graves. 5 A bare pecan tree slips a pencil shadow down a moonlit snow slope. 6 The falling snow flakes Cannot blunt the hard aches nor Match the steel stillness. 7 Under moon shadows A tall boy flashes knife and Slices star bright ice. 8 In the August grass Struck by the last rays of sun The cracked teacup screams. 9 Making jazz swing in Seventeen syllables AIN’T No square poet’s job.

Lonnie didn’t want to eat with Clifford. I tried to keep my eyes away from his mouth, Which opened uncontrollably, His thick saliva oozing over him. And he couldn’t talk. So I ate my lunch with Lonnie, heard him talk About the dive which broke his neck, about His motorcycle shop in Chico, while Another nurse gave Clifford lunch. Every day His parents came to push his chair around The grounds. A grim, determined pair; I wondered what disasters they had seen. The nurses talked with them about Their son. His eyes are beautiful, they said. One day a nurse who put her stethoscope To Clifford’s chest could not detect a beat. “His heart has stopped,” she said in quiet awe. The P.A. speakers cried: CODE BLUE, C-2, STAT! CODE BLUE, C-2, STAT! The doctors, nurses and technicians ran Into our crowded room. The squeaking Crash cart could not be heard above The urgent, human sounds the doctors made: A swirl of orders filled the air. “I need The mallet quick, goddamnit, QUICK, I said!” Encapsulated in my iron lung, I noted that doctors weren’t the calm Professionals portrayed by Robert Young And Richard Chamberlain, but people just As scared of death as everybody else. Then, they took me, iron lung and all, And parked me in a room Where women patients spend their lives. The room was quiet as a stone; no clocks Or television sets marked the time, Which passed as slowly as Moses climbing Mount Sinai, Until the social worker, Mrs. Mintzer, Came to talk to me about Shakespeare. All his tragedies, She said, contain a point where things begin To fall apart. The bold protagonist, No matter what his cunning, skill or strength, Can see his fall foreshadowed by a small Event. Macbeth saw Banquo at the feast And after that it went from bad to worse Until the murd’rous thane became a corpse Without a head. She paused to think a while. Now Clifford led a fairly normal life, She pointed out, despite his cerebral palsy. Playing cards and camping with his family Were not beyond his reach. The point where things fell apart occurred Five years ago, when he fell and broke His shoulder bone. “Clifford died,” she said. And tried to comfort me with her sympathy For my awful loss. I didn’t mourn his death at all. “Too bad he died so young,” I said, At twenty-three.” But all I cared about Was the space in my crowded room. The p.m. nurses took me back into my room. I asked one to play my tape, Appalachian Spring. She reached into my bedside stand and slipped. “There’s blood all over the floor, Clifford’s. I thought they’d cleaned up all that mess.” I spent the weekend after that in the solarium. I read and overheard the nurses in the next room. “They say he wrote exquisite poetry About the way he felt when people stared At him as if he were a freak.” And so I learned of my insensitivity, Insensitivity so great I failed To recognize a person Caught in much the same predicament as I. Such numbness isolates me more Than any iron lung.

Now you take ol Rufus. He beat drums, was free and funky under the arms, fucked white girls, jumped off a bridge (and thought nothing of the sacrilege), he copped out—and he was over twenty-one. Take Gerald. Sixteen years hadn’t even done a good job on his voice. He didn’t even know how to talk tough, or how to hide the glow of life before he was thrown in as “pigmeat” for the buzzards to eat. Gerald, who had no memory or hope of copper hot lips— or firm upthrusting thighs to reinforce his flow, let tall walls and buzzards change the course of his river from south to north. (No safety in numbers, like back on the block: two’s aplenty. three? definitely not. four? “you’re all muslims.” five? “you were planning a race riot.” plus, Gerald could never quite win with his precise speech and innocent grin the trust and fists of the young black cats.) Gerald, sun-kissed ten thousand times on the nose and cheeks, didn’t stand a chance, didn’t even know that the loss of his balls had been plotted years in advance by wiser and bigger buzzards than those who now hover above his track and at night light upon his back.

Knots like two dozen fists swayed with want from the boy’s kaffiyeh, that black and white scarf with its useless hands clopping against the wind in protest against this boy and his somebody lost, against their own swaying in a dance the lost body has lost. A boy. A somebody lost. A body bodied in the lights of inauguration night when every light in the city flared with hope. Always losing, always a boy left with a dozen weights, small circles on strings pulling his head down to the ground. Downcast. Drop your bucket here and make the city yours and all that jive keeps him from running. Escaping the pavement, where bodies finally fall to rest. The kaffiyeh keeps him from bucking against the wind, hurtling himself to the Grey- hound or Amtrak or I -95 with a book bag and hitched finger. His head shrouded in the black and white, the knots keeping his eyes down as he traverses neighborhoods with names like 3rd World, with names like a nation falling. And the coffin-voiced boy is who god tells us he will save, and so those swinging knots must be a kind of redemption, a way to see the bullets that bury you, constantly, as if death is the disguise hiding your wings.

For a flag! I answered facetiously. A flag of tomorrow, fluent in fire, not just the whispers, lisps, not just the still there of powdered wigs, dry winds. Who wants a speckled drape that folds as easy over smirch as fallen soldier? This is rhetorical. Like, "What to the Negro is the fourth of July?" A flag should be stitched with a fuse. Jefferson said for each generation a flag. Maybe he said Constitution. I once raised a high-top flag of my hair, a fist, a leather medallion of the motherland. I studied heraldry and maniples (which are not what you might guess), little sails and banners down to the vane of a feather. Because his kids were rebel cities my father loved like Sherman. Because I wanted history I could touch like the flank of a beast. My wife's people are from San Salvador. They sent us with a guard, his AK shouldered like a mandolin, among anil-tinted shawls and jerseys, across tiled and pocked concrete, and the gated stalls of El Centra. I felt sacred as a goat there, too, as I did below the Mason-Dixon where our only protection was the Fourteenth Amendment. Afraid our Yankee plates would be read aggressive as a Jolly Roger we rented a compact in Atlanta. Charleston, Savannah, Montgomery, and after Birmingham we were broke. Skipped Selma. Slept at B&Bs where my dreams power- washed layers of footnotes and Februaries, revealing the surreal sheen of Apollo Creed's trunks, the apocalyptic Americana of Jacko moonwalking around a tinfoil Buzz Aldrin planting the corporate ensign. Years passed. I grew youthless in my dad-pants, but still puffed at pinwheels and windsocks, launched glyphs of grillsmoke and one day it came to me, as if commissioned, Theaster Gates's Flag from old fire hoses, a couple dozen, like vertical blinds, no, like cabin floorboards of canvas colored rusty, brick dust, some cheerless drab-and-custard, beside a medley of vespertine blues, hoses evoking landscapes of sackcloth and gunny, texture of violence and tongues inflamed by shine, holy ghost. Ross, Duchamp, Johns, et al., are integrated here with officers of the peace, their dogs, and, in evidence, their pretend tumescence Gates has hung to cure like pelts or strips of jerky. How did it feel to shield spirit with flesh? I mean, what did it do to the body, water furry as the arm of an arctic bear? What thirst did it ignite? Gates's salute is a torch song, a rhythm of hues marching over a pentimento of rhyme. I approve its message, its pledge to birth a nation of belonging and to teach that nation of the fire shut up in our bones.

Tell em to take my bare walls down my cement abutments their parties thereof and clause of claws Leave me the land Scratch out: the land May prose and property both die out and leave me peace

1 Taking advantage of the relationships and interaction, which actually exist between what happens to her and her desire, she creates some metaphors both obvious and opaque, as screens of rays crisscrossing the landscape in which herself and what she expected from you in the way of support coincide, so that I and you resemble each other, now. The way they light the land like infrared without a trace on film, really, part of your image was linked so closely to my desire, it remained inside my body. It never reached the emotions, which tend to damage the body, but which memory requires. Thus a formal device was discovered for detailing information that was intimate and largely unacceptable to what I thought I required from you, regarding beauty in idea and form. She expected distress to automatically bring about this beauty, like a woman’s theft of fire rope from your house, but not her hanging in the orchard by the house. She was a stranger to you. She was never in your consciousness. Hence she was never forgotten. She is in you the way direct experience generates consciousness, adding the energy of its materialization. To live another person’s biography is not the same as to live his or her life. She constructs a story line or cluster of anecdotal details, like clothes around the body, instruments of both defense and expansion, which give meaning to fluctuations, such as in pleasures occurring between herself and you. Her sunglasses swathed in feathers express the contingency of a light and a space, so that the anecdote of a hanging could be utilized as colorist or combinatory data, instead of her instinct for the imaginary in which what she imagines represents what happens, whether or not it misrepresents it. Sometimes it happens during a routine she represents by evenness of light on the land or when things usually mean nothing, like harmony in light, what happens and something to mean join accidentally. The thing isn’t what it is, but it is like what it is. Like a fake, it doesn’t mean anything, although there is something to mean, so that her solitude is the guise of unending repetition of a hanging or her relationship with you, in which all that is to be included will find a place. This is empathy or sharing her intuition with her. You look into someone’s eyes as if you were seeing through the face. 2 Because it’s not possible to absorb more than one insight at a time, there seems to be a contradiction between the visual or space, and the context or meaning. She felt deep uneasiness with the image of this sunset of unnatural energy, its sinister expression of an order of impossible beauty we thought we lost, accounting for the intensity of yellow light on the hill, which is not a thing,and it is not a metaphor, the way your life is not a metaphor to her, or the way intense light on the hill is a recollection en plein air, in the sense that it happened. Soon the background turns gray and the hill regains its natural color, but there are three dimensions of gray. This is a metaphor for the fact that the hanged woman actually made contact with you, although you never knew her. There is a link with her appearance, as with sex, or the way a name is attached to something after naming it, by the occurrence of its name, in this case linking with the appearances or biographies of a whole parade of lovers, so what she thinks of as human help from him is no longer dependent on changing her desire for him in the present, but is a substitute for it. The landscape is empty and it is immanent. The context of the woman in its reality may differ from the context in which the viewer thinks about her, the element of transparency. The way the viewer thinks about her is the way low clouds extend a landscape. The viewer is acting on the landscape in consideration that the context of the viewer distinct from the context of general human help could be a metaphor for itself. There were yellow-leaved trees behind a screen of green ones at the edge of the orchard. They are not a border between organization and decay of autumn trees, which are organized. The yellow leaves around your feet have an impossible beauty that was achieved and then lost. A way you can define a woman is to remember everything the woman is not. If you move your head fast enough, you can all of a sudden discern the whole structure of the surface of each leaf, and it links in your stomach, as with sex. If you remember not desiring her fast enough, you can all of a sudden discern her whole body. You can feel in your stomach the way any moment that happened and in which you think about her goes a long way toward convincing you of the autonomy and pre-existence of her form. 3 Her concentration became a direct experience of his life, an erotic concentration. Her biography of her persistently locates the point of impact of one’s own system of representations, insofar as vision itself is a representative operating on what she sees, and for which a particular light can represent an initial condition. Even the slightest movement of a hand or a finger is controlled and emphasized as by a spotlight of this sensitiveness, the way repetition is a cessation of the potential for conscious experience, or death, visiting the same places during the same seasons, at almost the same hour, so that landscape could be a simple repetition, which thrives on reproduction, in order to resolve what is happening into its own combination or name of words in the form of its time, and in order to defer the story. In a way, her memory is a theory about how the hanged woman looked to her in the orchard, which she has to respect, in the sense that the landscape’s immanence is an organically developing failure of its language to speak its content. The connection between word and idea corresponding to the landscape is retained, but the connection between the word and the landscape is lost, so the shadow of a hill stays dark during lightning. How she sees the lightning is a time lapse into the planar dimension, a hierarchy of grammar or deference by way of the word belonging to her such as lady suicide or woman suicide, because the woman doesn’t die in her own absence or in effigy, so that no existing philosophy and no philosopher will know soon, enough points with enough speed to handle the richness of her reconstruction of her or him for long. He starts to see patterns in the words and the patterns are pretty to him and distract him. It is well known that lightning is attracted to body heat, a person on horseback or a large saguaro, the way a racket of birds in the morning is a kind of empathy for two people. If we retain the belief that her image of him or her, let’s say him, is a pre-requisite for gaining consciousness of the unknown person, we suppose there is no direct channel of communication to the unknown person, with the result that facts about him or her must exit into the world, before a life can be perceived between the light and dark of function or the object, and desire or the image. At any time one can turn into its opposite, like desire or a screen, and the object or her story and him, who does not so much convey an image as a background to the biography. So, he says, she must emphasize references and conditions of her own life over its memories, or what she sees of the landscape by the manner of its illumination, unless she says it is illuminated within the arms of a great cottonwood, yellow or green, a faith of imaginary or real connotation repeating itself from him, like alternating current or radioactive dirt being turned up that registers on her without marking her. 4 Her persistent observation, even after the frost, is of each leaf coinciding with its luminousness, because of its structure as a lighted space and which shows brightness in idea and form, so you have to maintain your own consciousness in order not to be unconscious with me. Even if we can uniquely bridge the gap between the fact of a frost and the value of luminousness, and even though these intrinsic properties of the plant may not be what it feels. What it feels may be a space with pillars, so with light the space extends, as in what you believe to live with. A belief is a word-like object. You can focus your attention on it down to a point, like desire or memory of a strong feeling. You have a certain amount of control over your feeling about general human help by changing what you believe, which embodies the memories your speech is empowered to represent, she says. Space is material, but seems to open up a beyond, which is thought to defy material in its failure to speak its content. It still cues this content by links or desires, as to a form of physical appearance. To the extent that she can reconstruct a context or pornography in her body suitable for a hanged woman, a contingency is beaten back, critically. In the sense that events happening at the same time are meaningful, but not connected, there are events which mean nothing, though there is something to mean. This is an easy way to expect with desire from moment to moment, while the woman was hanging herself, as if consistency and the quest for certainty were not emotional, as when a person begins telling a story, leaves move. He believed that when a life is valuable, there is further value when it is responded to as valuable, but this could occur through evaluative judgement, without his attendant emotion. The product is in one case consistent manners, in the other, beautiful manners.

Is this mountain all rock, or are there any villages on it? These are some of the things I said to her. We bake because it is a way of overcoming. In the journey of zest, I see myself. On the news every day people are standing up screaming or lying down screaming while others remain calm. She pointed out that I had not made eye contact with her at all. Then I cried properly in a short burst. This is the worst example of any circumstance ever, noted a journalist in his notebook. Let butter and chocolate be a wish not to die! I implored the bain-marie. She likened me to a sieve. I clutch all my poems to my chest and count them again and again. I am kneeling like a small dog. What’s going on with this modern world and the right wife not even knowing what the left wife is doing? Now all you have to do is cut off the legs. After an absence, after a hard task, after the way the hand turns, like this — There was so much I couldn’t contain. She asked me how I was feeling in my body at this moment; I said tense in my whole trunk area. A strong smell of white wine. She said it came from an impulse that she often used to have when she first started practicing. She said she believed feelings are held in the body. She asked me what was going on with my breath and I realized I was sort of holding it. Like the boxes in the cupboard. “Enough” can get bigger. How much bigger, though? When I say I’ve had enough, how will you know when to stop?

—Washington, D.C. JC was called the Rack at the work farm, aluminum milk pails dangling from his hands. Once a sudden fist crushed the cartilage of nose across his face, but JC only grinned, and the man with the fist stumbled away. JC sings his work farm songs on the street, swaying with black overcoat and guitar, cigarettes cheaper than food. But today he promises four sandwiches, two for each of us. The landlady, a Rumanian widow, has nailed a death mask over JC’s bed, sleeping plaster face of a drowned girl peaceful in the dark. As the girl contemplates water and pigeons batter the window, JC spreads the last deviled ham on two slices of bread, presses them together, then slowly tears four pieces. “Here,” he almost sings, “four sandwiches.”