the small boys’ punishing of the frogs
—a city memory-starved but intent on retributions
Imagine the architecture the governance
the men and the women in power
—tell me if it is not true you still
live in that city.
Imagine a city partitioned divorced from its hills
where temples and telescopes used to probe the stormy codices
a city brailling through fog
thicket and twisted wire
into dark’s velvet dialectic
sewers which are also rivers
art’s unchartered aquifers the springhead
sprung open in civic gardens left unlocked at night
I finger the glass beads I strung and wore
under the pines while the arrests were going on
(transfixed from neck to groin I wanted to save what I could)
They brought trays with little glasses of cold water
into the dark park a final village gesture
before the villages were gutted.
They were trying to save what they could
—tell me if this is not the same city.
I have forced myself to come back like a daughter
required to put her mother’s house in order
whose hands need terrible gloves to handle
the medicinals the disease packed in those linens
Accomplished criminal I’ve been but
can I accomplish justice here? Tear the old wedding sheets
into cleaning rags? Faithless daughter
like stone but with water pleating across
Let water be water let stone be stone
Tell me is this the same city.
This I—must she, must she lie scabbed with rust
crammed with memory in a place
of little anecdotes no one left
to go around gathering the full dissident story?
Rusting her hands and shoulders stone her lips
yet leaching down from her eyesockets tears
—for one self only? each encysts a city.
1997
A Long Conversation
—warm bloom of blood in the child’s arterial tree
could you forget? do you
remember? not to
know you were cold? Altercations
from porches color still high in your cheeks
the leap for the catch
the game getting wilder as the lights come on
catching your death it was said
your death of cold
something you couldn’t see ahead, you couldn’t see
(energy: Eternal Delight)
a long conversation
between persistence and impatience
between the bench of forced confessions
hip from groin swiveled
apart
young tongues torn in the webbing
the order of the cities
founded on disorder
and intimate resistance
desire exposed and shameless
as the flags go by
Sometime looking backward
into this future, straining
neck and eyes I’ll meet your shadow
with its enormous eyes
you who will want to know
what this was all about
Maybe this is the beginning of madness
Maybe it’s your conscience . . .
as you, straining neck and eyes
gaze forward into this past:
what did it mean to you?
—to receive “full human rights”
or the blue aperture of hope?
Mrs. Bartender, will you tell us dear
who came in when the nights were
cold and drear and who sat where
well helmeted and who
was showing off his greasy hair
Mrs. Bartender tell me quickly
who spoke thickly or not at all
how you decided what you’d abide
what was proud and thus allowed
how you knew what to do
with all the city threw at you
Mrs. Bartender tell me true
we’ve been keeping an eye on you
and this could be a long conversation
we could have a long accommodation
On the oilcloth of a certain table, in the motel room of a certain time and country, a white plastic saucer of cheese and hard salami, winter radishes, cold cuts, a chunk of bread, a bottle of red wine, another of water proclaimed drinkable. Someone has brought pills for the infection that is ransacking this region. Someone else came to clean birds salvaged from the oil spill. Here we eat, drink from thick tumblers, try to pierce this thicket with mere words.
Like a little cell. Let’s not aggrandize ourselves; we are not a little cell, but we are like a little cell.
Music arrives, searching for us. What hope or memory without it. Whatever we may think. After so many words.
A long conversation
pierced, jammed, scratched out:
bans, preventive detention, broken mouths
and on the scarred bench sequestered
a human creature with bloody wings
its private parts
reamed
still trying to speak
A hundred and fifty years. In 1848 a pamphlet was published, one of many but the longest-read. One chapter in the long book of memories and expectations. A chapter described to us as evil; if not evil out-of-date, naïve and mildewed. Even the book they say is out of print, lacking popular demand.
So we have to find out what in fact that manifesto said. Evil, we can judge. Mildew doesn’t worry us. We don’t want to be more naïve or out-of-date than necessary. Some old books are probably more useful than others.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society . . . it creates a world after its own image.
In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class developed—a class of laborers who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
—Can we say if or how we find this true in our lives today?
She stands before us as if we are a class, in school, but we are long out of school. Still, there’s that way she has of holding the book in her hands, as if she knew it contained the answer to her question.
Someone: —Technology’s changing the most ordinary forms of human contact—who can’t see that, in their own life?
—But technology is nothing but a means.
—Someone, I say, makes a killing off war. You: —I’ve been telling you, that’s the engine driving the free market. Not information, militarization. Arsenals spawning wealth.
Another woman: —But surely then patriarchal nationalism is the key?
He comes in late, as usual he’s been listening to sounds outside, the tide scraping the stones, the voices in nearby cottages, the way he used to listen at the beach, as a child. He doesn’t speak like a teacher, more like a journalist come back from war to report to us. —It isn’t nations anymore, look at the civil wars in all the cities. Is there a proletariat that can act effectively on this collusion, between the state and the armed and murderous splinter groups roaming at large? How could all these private arsenals exist without the export of increasingly sophisticated arms approved by the metropolitan bourgeoisie?
Now someone gets up and leaves, cloud-faced: —I can’t stand that kind of language. I still care about poetry.
All kinds of language fly into poetry, like it or not, or even if you’re only
as we were trying
to keep an eye
on the weapons on the street
and under the street
Just here, our friend L.: bony, nerve-driven, closeted, working as a nurse when he can’t get teaching jobs. Jew from a dynasty of converts, philosopher trained as an engineer, he can’t fit in where his brilliant and privileged childhood pointed him. He too is losing patience: What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc . . . & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any journalist in the use of the dangerous phrases such people use for their own ends?
You see, I know that it’s difficult to think well about “certainty,” “probability,” perception, etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life and other people’s lives. And thinking about these things is NOT THRILLING, but often downright nasty. And when it’s nasty then it’s MOST important.
His high-pitched voice with its darker, hoarser undertone.
At least he didn’t walk out, he stayed, long fingers drumming.
So now your paledark face thrown up
into pre-rain silver light your white shirt takes
on the hurl and flutter of the gulls’ wings
over your dark leggings their leathery legs
flash past your hurling arm one hand
snatching crusts from the bowl another hand holds close
You, barefoot on that narrow strand
with the iceplant edges and the long spindly pier
you just as the rain starts leaping into the bay
in your cloud of black, bronze and silvering hair
Later by the window on a fast-gathering winter evening
my eyes on the page then catch your face your breasts that light
. . . small tradespeople,
shopkeepers, retired tradesmen, handicraftsmen and peasants—
all these sink gradually into the proletariat
partly because their
diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which
competition with the large capitalists
partly because their specialized
skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production.
Thus, the proletariat is recruited
from all classes of the population. . . .
pelicans and cormorants stumbling up the bay
the last gash of light abruptly bandaged in darkness
1799, Coleridge to Wordsworth: I wish
you would write a poem
addressed to those who, in consequence
of the complete failure of the French Revolution
have thrown up all hopes
of the amelioration of mankind
and are sinking into an almost epicurean
selfishness, disguising the same
under the soft titles of domestic attachment
and contempt for visionary philosophes
A generation later, revolutions scorching Europe:
the visionaries having survived despite
rumors of complete failure
the words have barely begun to match the desire
when the cold fog blows back in
organized and disordering
muffling words and faces
Your lashes, visionary! screening
in sudden rushes this
shocked, abraded crystal
I can imagine a sentence that might someday end with the word, love. Like the one written by that asthmatic young man, which begins, At the risk of appearing ridiculous . . . It would have to contain losses, resiliencies, histories faced; it would have to contain a face—his yours hers mine—by which I could do well, embracing it like water in my hands, because by then we could be sure that “doing well” by one, or some, was immiserating nobody. A true sentence then, for greeting the newborn.
(—Someplace else. In our hopes.)
But where ordinary collective affections carry a price (swamped, or accounted worthless) I’m one of those driven seabirds stamping oil-distempered waters maimed “by natural causes.”
The music’s pirated from somewhere else: Catalan songs reaching us after fifty years. Old nuevos canciones, after twenty years? In them, something about the sweetness of life, the memory of tradition of mercy, struggles for justice. A long throat, casting memory forward.
“it’s the layers of history
we have to choose, along
with our own practice: what must be tried again
over and over and
what must not be repeated
and at what depth which layer
will we meet others”
the words barely begin
to match the desire
and the mouth crammed with dollars doesn’t testify
. . . the eye has become a human eye
when its object has become a human, social object
BRECHT BECOMES GERMAN ICON ANEW
FORGIVEN MARXIST IDEAS
. . . the Arts, you know—they’re Jews, they’re left-wing,
in other words, stay away . . .
So, Bo Kunstelaar, tell us true
how you still do what you do
your old theories forgiven
—the public understands
it was one thing then but now is now
and everyone says your lungs are bad
and your liver very sad
and the force of your imagination
has no present destination
though subversive has a certain charm
and art can really do no harm
but still they say you get up and go
every morning to the studio
Is it still a thrill?
or an act of will?
Mr. Kunstelaar?
—After so long, to be asked an opinion? Most of that time, the opinions unwelcome. But opinion anyway was never art. Along the way I was dropped by some; others could say I had dropped them. I tried to make in my studio what I could not make outside it. Even to have a studio, or a separate room to sleep in, was a point in fact. In case you miss the point: I come from hod-carriers, lint-pickers, people who hauled cables through half-dug tunnels. Their bodies created the possibility of my existence. I come from the kind of family where loss means not just grief but utter ruin—adults and children dispersed into prostitution, orphanages, juvenile prisons, emigration—never to meet again. I wanted to show those lives—designated insignificant—as beauty, as terror. They were significant to me and what they had endured terrified me. I knew such a life could have been my own. I also knew they had saved me from it.
—I tried to show all this and as well to make an art as impersonal as it demanded.
—I have no theories. I don’t know what I am being forgiven. I am my art: I make it from my body and the bodies that produced mine. I am still trying to find the pictorial language for this anger and fear rotating on an axle of love. If I still get up and go to the studio—it’s there I find the company I need to go on working.
“This is for you
this little song
without much style
fell like a red leaf
through my tears
in those fogbound years
when without ado
you gave me a bundle of fuel to burn
when my body was utterly cold
This is for you
who would not applaud
when with a kick to the breast or groin
they dragged us into the van
when flushed faces cheered
at our disgrace
or looked away this is
for you who stayed
to see us through
delivered our bail and
disappeared
This little song
without much style
may it find you
somewhere well.”
In the dark windowglass
a blurred face
—is it still mine?
Who out there hoped to change me—
what out there has tried?
What sways and presses against the pane
what can’t I see beyond or through—
charred, crumpled, ever-changing human language
is that still you?
1997–1998
Fox
* * *
Victory
Something spreading underground won’t speak to us
under skin won’t declare itself
not all life-forms want dialogue with the
machine-gods in their drama hogging down
the deep bush clear-cutting refugees
from ancient or transient villages into
our opportunistic fervor to search
crazily for a host a lifeboat
Suddenly instead of art we’re eyeing
organisms traced and stained on cathedral transparencies
cruel blues embroidered purples succinct yellows
a beautiful tumor
I guess you’re not alone I fear you’re alone
There’s, of course, poetry:
awful bridge rising over naked air: I first
took it as just a continuation of the road:
“a masterpiece of engineering
praised, etc.” then on the radio:
“incline too steep for ease of, etc.”
Drove it nonetheless because I had to
this being how— So this is how
I find you: alive and more
As if (how many conditionals must we suffer?)
I’m driving to your side
—an intimate collusion—
packed in the trunk my bag of foils for fencing with pain
glasses of varying spectrum for sun or fog or sun-struck
rain or bitterest night my sack of hidden
poetries, old glue shredding from their spines
my time exposure of the Leonids
over Joshua Tree
As if we’re going to win this O because
If you have a sister I am not she
nor your mother nor you my daughter