517 Social commentaries poems

A man and a woman pretend to be white ice Three men at the lavender door are closed in by the storm With strong prejudice and money to buy the green pines One weekend fisherman and blue painters watch The vivid violet winds blow visibility from the mountain Beyond the black valley. That means or then you know You’re in a big cloud of it, it’s brilliant white mid-February A week or two left on distracting black trees Before the brownish buds obscure your view of the valley again. Looking for company four dark men and a burnt sienna woman Come in for three minutes, then bye-bye like a gold watch left on the chair Or part of the sum of what big white families think up To store for long yellow Sundays to eat for brown ecological company. At some point later gorgeous red adventure stops, did you forget To turn it down and laugh in the face of the fearful white storm anyway Or picture it brilliant blue for a further Sunday memory In a coloring book, you talk as lightly as you can Refusing a big pink kiss, you burned the Sunday sauce Of crushed red tomatoes, you turn it down to just an orange glow. This particular storm, considering the pause and the greenish thaw before it Reminds me in its mildness of imitating a sea-green memory that is actually In the future, I imitate an imagined trumpet sound Or the brilliant purple words of a man or woman I haven’t met yet Or perhaps it’s a grey-haired man I already know who said some- thing yesterday To a mutual friend who will give me the whole story in black and white tomorrow Or the day after, just as the big orange plows for the local businesses Go to work to push away the rest of the white snow that will fall tonight.

What etiquette holds us back from more intimate speech, especially now, at the end of the world? Can’t we begin a conversation here in the vestibule, then gradually move it inside? What holds us back from saying things outright? We’ve killed the earth. Yet we speak of other things. Our words should cauterize all wounds to the truth.

The streamers choking the main arteries Of downtown. The brass band led by a child From the home for the handicapped. The old men Showing their hair (what’s left of it), The buttons of their shirts Popping in time To the salsa flooding out Of their portable headphones, And mothers letting their babies Be held by strangers. And the bus drivers Taping over their fare boxes And willing to give directions. Is there any reason to mention All the drinks are on the house? Thick, adolescent boys Dismantle their BB guns. Here is the world (what’s left of it), In brilliant motion, The oil slick at the curb Danced into a thousand Splintered steps. The bag ladies toss off their Garments To reveal wings. “This dance you do,” drawls the cop, “What do you call it?” We call it scalding the air. We call it dying with your Shoes on. And across the street The bodies of tramps Stumble In a sober language. And across the street Shy young girls step behind Their nameless boyfriends, Twirling their skirts. And under an archway A delivery boy discovers His body has learned to speak, And what does this street look like If not a runway, A polished wood floor? From the air, Insects drawn by the sweat Alight, when possible, On the blur Of torsos. It is the ride Of their tiny lives. The wind that burns their wings, The heaving, oblivious flesh, Mountains stuffed with panic, An ocean That can’t make up its mind. They drop away With the scorched taste Of vertigo. And under a swinging light bulb Some children Invent a game With the shadow the bulb makes, And the beat of their hearts. They call it dust in the mouth. They call it horse with no rider. They call it school with empty books. In the next room Their mother throws her dress away to chance. It drops to the floor Like a brush sighs across a drum head, And when she takes her lover, What are they thinking of If not a ballroom filled with mirrors, A world where no one has the right To stumble? In a parking lot An old man says this: “I am a ghost dance. I remember the way my hair felt, Damp with sweat and wind. When the wind kisses the leaves, I am dancing. When the subway hits the third rail, I am dancing. When the barrel goes over Niagara Falls, I am dancing. Music rings my bones like metal. O, Jazz has come from heaven,” he says, And at the z he jumps, arcing his back like a heron’s neck, And stands suddenly revealed As a balance demon, A home for Stetson hats. We have all caught the itch: The neon artist Wiring up his legs, The tourist couple Recording the twist on their Instamatic camera, And in a factory, A janitor asks his broom For a waltz, And he grasps it like a woman He’d have to live another Life to meet, And he spins around the dust bin And machines and thinks: Is everybody happy? And he spins out the side door, Avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk, Grinning as if he’d just received The deepest kiss in the world.

They are weighing the babies again on color television. They are hanging these small bags of bones up in canvas slings to determine which ones will receive the dried-milk mush, the concentrate made out of ground-up trash fish. For years we have watched them, back-lit by the desert, these miles of dusty hands holding out goatskins or cups, their animals dead or dying of rinderpest, and after the credits come up I continue to sit through Dinner with Julia, where, in a French fish poacher big enough for a small brown baby, an Alaska salmon simmers in a court bouillon. For a first course, steak tartare to awaken the palate. With it Julia suggests a zinfandel. This scene has a polite, a touristy flavor to it, and I let it play. But somewhere Oxfam goes on spooning gluey gruel between the parched lips of potbellied children, the ones who perhaps can be saved from kwashiorkor—an ancient Ghanaian word— though with probable lowered IQs, the voiceover explains, caused by protein deficiencies linked to the drought and the drought has grown worse with the gradual increase in herds overgrazing the thin forage grasses of the Sahel. This, says the voice, can be laid to the natural greed of the nomad deceived by technicians digging new wells which means (a slow pan of the sand) that the water table has dropped. And now to Julia’s table is borne the resplendent fish. Always the camera is angled so that the guests look up. Among them I glimpse that sly Dean, Jonathan Swift. After the credits come up I continue to sit with those who are starving to death in a distant nation squatting, back-lit by the desert, hands out, in my head and the Dublin Dean squats there too, observing the population that waits for too little dried milk, white rice, trash fish. Always the camera is angled so they look up while their babies are weighed in slings on color television, look into our living rooms and the shaded rooms we sleep in.

Fine bitches all, and Molly Dance   ... — Djuna Barnes Come for duty’s sake (as girls do) we watch The sly very old woman wile away from her pious And stagger-blind friend, their daily split of gin. She pours big drinks. We think of what Has crumpled, folded, slumped her flesh in And muddied her once tumbling blood that, young, Sped her, threaded with brave power: a Tower, Now Babel, then of  ivory, of  the Shulamite, Collapsed to this keen dame moving among Herself. She hums, she plays with used bright Ghosts, makes real dolls, and drinking sings Come here My child, and feel it, dear. A crooking finger Shows how hot the oven is. (Also she is alive with hate. Also she is afraid of  hell. Also, we wish We might, illiberal, uncompassionate, Run from her smell, her teeth in the dish.) Even dying, her life riots in her. We stand stock still Though aswarm with itches under her disreputable smiles. We manage to mean well. We endure, and more. We learn time’s pleasure, catch our future and its cure. We’re dear blood daughters to this every hag, and near kin To any after this of  those our mirrors tell us foolishly envy us, Presuming us, who are young, to be beautiful, kind, and sure. Originally appeared in the March 1958 issue of Poetry magazine.

“Fine bitches all, and Molly Dance...” —Djuna Barnes Come for duty’s sake (as girls do) we watch The sly very old woman wile away from her pious And stagger-blind friend, their daily split of gin. She pours big drinks. We think of what Has crumpled, folded, slumped her flesh in And muddied her once tumbling blood that, young, Sped her, threaded with brave power: a Tower, Now Babel, then of ivory, of the Shulamite, Collapsed to this keen dame moving among Herself. She hums, she plays with used bright Ghosts, makes real dolls, and drinking sings Come here My child, and feeling it, dear. A crooking finger Shows how hot the oven is. (Also she is alive with hate. Also she is afraid of hell. Also, we wish We might, illiberal, uncompassionate, Run from her smell, her teeth in the dish.) Even dying, her life riots in her. We stand stock still Though aswarm with itches under her disreputable smiles. We manage to mean well. We endure, and more. We learn time’s pleasure, catch our future and its cure. We’re dear blood daughters to this every hag, and near kin To any after this of those our mirrors tell us foolishly envy us, Presuming us, who are young, to be beautiful, kind, and sure. March 1958

walking down park amsterdam or columbus do you ever stop to think what it looked like before it was an avenue did you ever stop to think what you walked before you rode subways to the stock exchange (we can’t be on the stock exchange we are the stock exchanged) did you ever maybe wonder what grass was like before they rolled it into a ball and called it central park where syphilitic dogs and their two-legged tubercular masters fertilize the corners and side-walks ever want to know what would happen if your life could be fertilized by a love thought from a loved one who loves you ever look south on a clear day and not see time’s squares but see tall Birch trees with sycamores touching hands and see gazelles running playfully after the lions ever hear the antelope bark from the third floor apartment ever, did you ever, sit down and wonder about what freedom’s freedom would bring it’s so easy to be free you start by loving yourself then those who look like you all else will come naturally ever wonder why so much asphalt was laid in so little space probably so we would forget the Iroquois, Algonquin and Mohicans who could caress the earth ever think what Harlem would be like if our herbs and roots and elephant ears grew sending a cacophony of sound to us the parrot parroting black is beautiful black is beautiful owls sending out whooooo’s making love ... and me and you just sitting in the sun trying to find a way to get a banana tree from one of the monkeys koala bears in the trees laughing at our listlessness ever think its possible for us to be happy

When I left Eli Zabar the cut-out star on the window was whirling in the animation of the rich and hungry hunched over tables for a $30 sandwich and a Diet Coke. It was raining and the blurred glass of the galleries was the gold leaf of the Carrig Rhone frames— Childe Hassam’s dabs of Connecticut trees the diaphanous blue on the fleshy rocks, the melting opal of the shoals. Inside the Whitney the rain trailed down my face; and I found myself in a quiet corner staring at the pink face of Marilyn Monroe. I could still smell the smoldering high-tech plastic as it burned the air. In the whiteness of her teeth, in the almost aahh of her mouth and the half-drugged eyes under the lids of teal shadow, the air kept singeing my nose. Against the pale walls Marilyn’s face dissolved like a stretched mesh and litho ink where plain form is a place of no desire like the empty mirror of the Hudson at dawn. In the fissures of her make-up, the planes of color led back and back behind her teeth longing— to the deception by the Falls on her honeymoon (with Joseph Cotton in Niagara)—where we found her clothed and alarmed, and later desperate for the affirmation, of a President’s limp dick and the crisp sheets the same color of these walls—as my t shirt dries to my skin and the faintest scent of ground zero sifts down on the walls whiter than the wingtip vortices of melting in the morning light.

for Bill Berkson & Khaled al-Assad the union president’s dead & they won’t let transgender people pee in north carolina & here i’m complaining about climbing the mountain again the mountain’ll always remain if i’m lucky, to keep me from sucking & only a king mule will do. humbled by bill as he goes through the business of staying alive with dignified unconcern. i don’t deserve him, have no zen no dasein, just half-a-dozen self -inflicted wounds i’m expected to grin & bear & like robert plant, i do. it’s like i’m in a rembrandt or something holding testtubes to the sun to read my urine specimens & —spoiler alert—i’m trigger sad checked my email mid-poem so of course its bad news the ancient city is practically gone, palmyra, palmyra at least i still have bill here in isis usa

Today a celebrity chimpanzee went postal, tearing up a woman’s face in Connecticut. And as the Taliban were given the suburbs of Swat in which to stone to death women taken in adultery, a Muslim in New York whose radio station promoted Islam as the most humane religion cut off his wife’s head. Tomorrow, of course, will be another day, but we live one day at a time. Yesterday I uncovered the ribbon snake in the woodpile, stiff and cold in its winter sleep. A new urgency for spring: I put the split log back and took my wood from the farther end of the last stack. What’s with the chimp? I wondered, driving between filthy snowbanks past stark trees like bony hands clawing up out of the frozen earth to grab a gray heaven. My wife thinks it’s all that wireless buzz hissing unbeknownst through everyone’s brains. I lean more toward toilet training. For sure, it began to go bad one unknown day before history when the last man was browbeaten to step beyond a globe of golden firelight to drain his dragon in outer darkness. But we can’t dwell in the past, can we? “To spring out on” we call hereabouts the firewood we wade through crusted snow to cut in March. Someone just might have to wake up early this year. But, then, let’s just try to stay in the day, shall we?