517 Social commentaries poems

Closed Mondays is music    is men off early from work    is waiting for the chance at the chair while the eagle claws holes in your pockets    keeping time    by the turning of rusty fans    steel flowers with cold breezes    is having nothing better to do    than guess at the years of hair    matted beneath the soiled caps of drunks    the pain of running a fisted comb through stubborn knots    is the dark dirty low down blues    the tender heads of sons fresh from cornrows    all wonder at losing    half their height is a mother gathering hair    for good luck    for a soft wig    is the round difficulty of ears    the peach faced boys asking Eddie to cut in parts and arrows wanting to have their names read for just a few days    and among thin jazz    is the quick brush of a done head    the black flood around your feet    grandfathers stopping their games of ivory dominoes    just before they reach the bone yard    is winking widowers announcing cut it clean off    I’m through courting and hair only gets in the way

I stood at a bus corner one afternoon, waiting for the #2. An old guy stood waiting too. I stared at him. He caught my stare, grinned, gap-toothed. Will you sign my coat? he said. Held out a pen. He wore a dirty canvas coat that had signatures all over it, hundreds, maybe thousands. I’m trying to get everybody, he said. I signed. On a little space on a pocket. Sometimes I remember: I am one of everybody.

1. “Naked woman surrounded by police”: that’s one way to start the poem. But would she mean anything devoid of her context, in this case a lushly late-August deciduous forest, some maple, mostly oak? She carries no prop—for example, no bike chain, which the cops could be sawing from the tree trunk that she’s wedded to her body. But let’s start with her pure, and untranslated, as the famous cartoon of the door is a mystery until we post the word LADIES at a point that would be four feet up from the ground if this door were not drawn two inches tall—it’s us, you see, who make believe it corresponds to a “true-life” human door. Does it help if I say the naked woman is “really” my true- life friend, she of the tangled dago surname we don’t need to get into here? And if I say next that she has been swimming—in Lake Tiorati— 2. you can see how straightaway the tangling subdivides into (a) where the hell is Lake Tiorati? and (b) why naked?—to the last let me answer that it’s 1978 and she is twenty; at college she’s been reading Simone de Beauvoir and learning words like patriarchy and oppression. And these have been Mixmastered into her thinking even about swimsuits—i.e., that not to wear one is to rip the sign off the door and stomp it underfoot. When she lies on a rock the last thing she expects is the tingling she feels now against her wrist, from a guy peeing brazenly at her perimeter. This is an impasse whose bud she thought she had nipped by aggravating her muscles into interlaced mounds so her body resembles a relief map of the Appalachians. In whose northernmost range this story unfolds & hence the much-delayed answer to item (a), above. 3. “Naked woman dadadadada police”: not a story but words at the end of a chain whose first link is her realizing that the Puerto Rican kids across the lake splashing and whooping are not having fun— though this is the sign that she’d stuck on their door. No, there’s another word for the kid slapping his palms on the water: Drowning. Even the urinater abruptly stops his stream and stumbles back from her, ashamed. And because she’s the one with the lifeguard build and because all the guys are much too drunk, without even thinking she finds herself paddling toward the spot these kids are now screaming Julio! at, where she draws a mental X upon the water. Of course, it is a fantasy, the correspondence that would make a drawing equal life, and so you understand how amazing it is, when she dives to the bottom and her hand happens on the child. 4. Perhaps what she expected was for the men on shore to pay her no mind, as in Manet’s Déjeuner . . . : the naked woman sits among them, yet she is a ghost. But the kids keep yelling Julio! even after she’s hauled the wet one out, the one she points to:Julio okay. No, they shriek, Julio otro! words she knows just enough Spanish to know mean there’s another Julio in the lake. Whom she cannot save despite her next round of diving, which lasts until the cops come hiking down the trail in their cop shoes. Then she comes ashore and stands shivering among them, telling the story calmly enough until she ends it with: for Christ’s sake can’t anyone give her a T-shirt? They’re staring as if somehow she’s what’s to blame, seeing a naked woman, not the miracle. Which is, of course, the living boy, that with these words —Julio otro!— we manage to make sense to anyone at all.

Just over the horizon a great machine of death is roaring and rearing. We can hear it always. Earthquake, starvation, the ever-renewing sump of corpse-flesh. But in this valley the snow falls silently all day, and out our window We see the curtain of it shifting and folding, hiding us away in our little house, We see earth smoothened and beautified, made like a fantasy, the snow-clad trees So graceful. In our new bed, which is big enough to seem like the north pasture almost With our two cats, Cooker and Smudgins, lying undisturbed in the southeastern and southwestern corners, We lie loving and warm, looking out from time to time. “Snowbound,” we say. We speak of the poet Who lived with his young housekeeper long ago in the mountains of the western province, the kingdom Of cruelty, where heads fell like wilted flowers and snow fell for many months Across the pass and drifted deep in the vale. In our kitchen the maple-fire murmurs In our stove. We eat cheese and new-made bread and jumbo Spanish olives Which have been steeped in our special brine of jalapeños and garlic and dill and thyme. We have a nip or two from the small inexpensive cognac that makes us smile and sigh. For a while we close the immense index of images that is our lives—for instance, The child on the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico sitting naked in 1966 outside his family’s hut, Covered with sores, unable to speak. But of course we see the child every day, We hold out our hands, we touch him shyly, we make offerings to his implacability. No, the index cannot close. And how shall we survive? We don’t and cannot and will never Know. Beyond the horizon a great unceasing noise is undeniable. The machine, Like an immense clanking vibrating shuddering unnameable contraption as big as a house, as big as the whole town, May break through and lurch into our valley at any moment, at any moment. Cheers, baby. Here’s to us. See how the curtain of snow wavers and then falls back.

Set up curbside, jewelry tray entanglement with things looking up, but nothing sells unless there is someone looking down, and who might that be? For the moment it’s not raining and off-coast in pods the gray whales parade south. Photographs sprout with the season. The gray whale’s spout is heart shaped, enough said. Just listen for the icon’s intake of breath and see what you can see. Yes, but that was yesterday and which way are prices going to go? There is a pack forming and they will need a leader. It’s then you kick the snot out of them, not before, and make it believable this one last time; but don’t depend on it, auditors, even though it’s turned out like this so many times before. There may be an image whose mind has changed. Sorry, no rain checks in this scheme of things, the windows are broken and boards keep out the light, it’s the cheapest thing to do and then forget it, as has been done before, before, etc. Could you pick out of a lineup who is the culprit here? The mirror is one-way and there’s no way to be sure which side you’re on, but so what? Go on making faces anyway, but be sure, now and then, to check your hand before your face, if just to say Wheaties, the best is yet to be. Our inventions, gods and needles, for instance, are built to say this to us ever and forever. It’s obvious why we can’t give them up, they’re ours, for ourself self’s sake! We live in the afterlife of what, unalterable, has already taken place. The minute you start acting like Robinson Crusoe it’s plain to see you’ve lost your hold on the world. There are many such, so many, washed up on our island shores! They end up sleeping over grates and in doorways at night, far distant from tree ripe fruit and warm sand. The dumps of our artifacts bewilder them. They probe, not knowing what to expect from excess. They act out an experiment, a hairline calculation for survival: is the expenditure of energy to dig up carrots from the frozen ground more than their return in calories? Did you notice the price tag when the wine was poured, the cool chardonnay, the special cabernet, white and red absurdities of words? The motion lights are set to react outside the house but, tell me, did you see the clutter in the study, one would think! Those catalogs, the cave, shadows.

The bleachers are packed full. Everyone’s watching. What if I fall? What if my time is too slow? One more rider, then me. "Next rider up!" I click my tongue, push my boots hard in the stirrups, heels down. My hands are sweaty, but I hold the reins right. Ready, girl. Ride! I bust through the gate, spin round the first barrel, shoot to the second and circle around tight, leaning so hard, my stirrup kicks dirt. Streak to the last barrel— spin, fly, race down the middle. Home!

for John Limon The game of baseball is not a metaphor and I know it’s not really life. The chalky green diamond, the lovely dusty brown lanes I see from airplanes multiplying around the cities are only neat playing fields. Their structure is not the frame of history carved out of forest, that is not what I see on my ascent. And down in the stadium, the veteran catcher guiding the young pitcher through the innings, the line of concentration between them, that delicate filament is not like the way you are helping me, only it reminds me when I strain for analogies, the way a rookie strains for perfection, and the veteran, in his wisdom, seems to promise it, it glows from his upheld glove, and the man in front of me in the grandstand, drinking banana daiquiris from a thermos, continuing through a whole dinner to the aromatic cigar even as our team is shut out, nearly hitless, he is not like the farmer that Auden speaks of in Breughel’s Icarus, or the four inevitable woman-hating drunkards, yelling, hugging each other and moving up and down continuously for more beer and the young wife trying to understand what a full count could be to please her husband happy in his old dreams, or the little boy in the Yankees cap already nodding off to sleep against his father, program and popcorn memories sliding into the future, and the old woman from Lincoln, Maine, screaming at the Yankee slugger with wounded knees to break his leg this is not a microcosm, not even a slice of life and the terrible slumps, when the greatest hitter mysteriously goes hitless for weeks, or the pitcher’s stuff is all junk who threw like a magician all last month, or the days when our guys look like Sennett cops, slipping, bumping each other, then suddenly, the play that wasn’t humanly possible, the Kid we know isn’t ready for the big leagues, leaps into the air to catch a ball that should have gone downtown, and coming off the field is hugged and bottom-slapped by the sudden sorcerers, the winning team the question of what makes a man slump when his form, his eye, his power aren’t to blame, this isn’t like the bad luck that hounds us, and his frustration in the games not like our deep rage for disappointing ourselves the ball park is an artifact, manicured, safe, “scene in an Easter egg”, and the order of the ball game, the firm structure with the mystery of accidents always contained, not the wild field we wander in, where I’m trying to recite the rules, to repeat the statistics of the game, and the wind keeps carrying my words away

Mail-day, and over the world in a thousand drag-nets The bundles of letters are dumped on the docks and beaches, And all that is dear to the personal conscious reaches Around us again like filings around iron magnets, And war stands aside for an hour and looks at our faces Of total absorption that seem to have lost their places. O demobilized for a moment, a world is made human, Returns to a time that is neither the present or then, But a garland of clippings and wishes of who-knows-when, A time of its own creation, a thing of acumen That keeps us, like movies, alive with a purpose, aside From the play-acting truth of the newsreel in which we have died. And aside from the candy and pictures and books we receive, As if we were patients whose speedy recovery were certain, There is proof of the End and the lights and the bow at the curtain, After which we shall smile at each other and get up to leave. Aside from the play in the play there is all that is fact, These letters, the battle in progress, the place of the act. And the optimal joy of the conflict, the tears of the ads May move us or not, and the movies at night in the palms May recall us or not to the kiss, and on Sunday the psalms May remind us of Sunday or not, but aside from the lads Who arrive like our letters still fresh from the kiss and the tear, There are mouths that are dusty and eyes that are wider than fear. Say no more of the dead than a prayer, say no more of the land Where the body is laid in the coral than that it is far; Take your finger away from the map of wherever-we-are, For we lie in the map of the chart of your elderly hand; Do not hasten the future; in agony too there is time For the growth of the rose of the spirit astir in the slime. For aside from ourselves as we are there is nothing alive Except as it keeps us alive, not tomorrow but now, Our mail-day, today of the blood of the sweat of our brow, The year of our war to the end. When and where we arrive Is no matter, but how is the question we urgently need, How to love and to hate, how to die, how to write and to read.

Give me hunger, O you gods that sit and give The world its orders. Give me hunger, pain and want, Shut me out with shame and failure From your doors of gold and fame, Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger! But leave me a little love, A voice to speak to me in the day end, A hand to touch me in the dark room Breaking the long loneliness. In the dusk of day-shapes Blurring the sunset, One little wandering, western star Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow. Let me go to the window, Watch there the day-shapes of dusk And wait and know the coming Of a little love.

All their fences All their prisons All their exercises All their agendas All their stanzas look alike All their metaphors All their bookstores All their plantations All their assassinations All their stanzas look alike All their rejection letters All their letters to the editor All their arts and letters All their letters of recommendation All their stanzas look alike All their sexy coverage All their literary journals All their car commercials All their bribe-spiked blurbs All their stanzas look alike All their favorite writers All their writing programs All their visiting writers All their writers-in-residence All their stanzas look alike All their third worlds All their world series All their serial killers All their killing fields All their stanzas look alike All their state grants All their tenure tracks All their artist colonies All their core faculties All their stanzas look alike All their Selected Collecteds All their Oxford Nortons All their Academy Societies All their Oprah Vendlers All their stanzas look alike All their haloed holocausts All their coy hetero couplets All their hollow haloed causes All their tone-deaf tercets All their stanzas look alike All their tables of contents All their Poet Laureates All their Ku Klux classics All their Supreme Court justices Except one, except one Exceptional one. Exceptional or not, One is not enough. All their stanzas look alike. Even this, after publication, Might look alike. Disproves My stereo types.