5
There’s a young cat sticking
her head through window bars
she’s hungry like us
but can feed on mice
her bronze erupting fur
speaks of a life already wild
her golden eyes
don’t give quarter She’ll teach us Let’s call her
Sister
when we get milk we’ll give her some
6
I’ve told you, let’s try to sleep in this funny camp
All night pitiless pilotless things go shrieking
above us to somewhere
Don’t let your faces turn to stone
Don’t stop asking me why
Let’s pay attention to our cat she needs us
Maybe tomorrow the bakers can fix their ovens
7
“We sang them to naps told stories made
shadow-animals with our hands
wiped human debris off boots and coats
sat learning by heart the names
some were too young to write
some had forgotten how”
2001
This Evening Let’s
not talk
about my country How
I’m from an optimistic culture
that speaks louder than my passport
Don’t double-agent-contra my
invincible innocence I’ve
got my own
suspicions Let’s
order retsina
cracked olives and bread
I’ve got questions of my own but
let’s give a little
let’s let a little be
If friendship is not a tragedy
if it’s a mercy
we can be merciful
if it’s just escape
we’re neither of us running
why otherwise be here
Too many reasons not
to waste a rainy evening
in a backroom of bouzouki
and kitchen Greek
I’ve got questions of my own but
let’s let it be a little
There’s a beat in my head
song of my country
called Happiness, U.S.A.
Drowns out bouzouki
drowns out world and fusion
with its Get—get—get
into your happiness before
happiness pulls away
hangs a left along the piney shore
weaves a hand at you—“one I adore”—
Don’t be proud, run hard for that
enchantment boat
tear up the shore if you must but
get into your happiness because
before
and otherwise
it’s going to pull away
So tell me later
what I know already
and what I don’t get
yet save for another day
Tell me this time
what you are going through
travelling the Metropolitan
Express
break out of that style
give me your smile
awhile
2001
There Is No One Story and One Story Only
The engineer’s story of hauling coal
to Davenport for the cement factory, sitting on the bluffs
between runs looking for whales, hauling concrete
back to Gilroy, he and his wife renewing vows
in the glass chapel in Arkansas after 25 years
The flight attendant’s story murmured
to the flight steward in the dark galley
of her fifth-month loss of nerve
about carrying the baby she’d seen on the screen
The story of the forensic medical team’s
small plane landing on an Alaska icefield
of the body in the bag they had to drag
over the ice like the whole life of that body
The story of the man driving
600 miles to be with a friend in another country seeming
easy when leaving but afterward
writing in a letter difficult truths
Of the friend watching him leave remembering
the story of her body
with his once and the stories of their children
made with other people and how his mind went on
pressing hers like a body
There is the story of the mind’s
temperature neither cold nor celibate
Ardent The story of
not one thing only.
2002
Usonian Journals 2000
[Usonian: the term used by Frank Lloyd Wright for his prairie-inspired architecture. Here, of the United States of North America.]
Citizen/Alien/Night/Mare
A country I was born and lived in undergoes rapid and flagrant change. I return here as a stranger. In fact I’ve lived here all along. At a certain point I realized I was no longer connected along any continuous strand to the nature of the change. I can’t find my passport. Nobody asks me to show it.
Day/Job/Mare
. . . to lunch with K., USonian but recently from a British university. Described as “our Marxist.” Dark and pretty, already she’s got half the department classified: She’s crazy . . . He’s carrying the chip of race on his shoulder . . . she’s here because he is, isn’t she? . . . He’s not likely to make it through . . . Ask her about current Brit. labor scene; she talks about the influence of the industrial revolution on Victorian prose. My aim: get clear of this, find another day job.
As we left the dark publike restaurant the street—ordinary enough couple of blocks between a parking lot and an office complex—broke into spitting, popping sounds and sudden running. I held back against the wall, she beside me. Something happened then everything. A man’s voice screamed, then whined: a police siren starting up seemed miles away but then right there. I didn’t see any blood. We ran in different directions, she toward, I away from, the police.
Document Window
Could I just show what’s happening. Not that shooting, civil disturbance, whatever it was. I’d like you to see how differently we’re all moving, how the time allowed to let things become known grows shorter and shorter, how quickly things and people get replaced. How interchangeable it all could get to seem. Could get to seem . . . the kind of phrase we use now, avoiding the verb to be. There’s a sense in which, we say, dismissing other senses.
Rimbaud called for the rational derangement of all the senses in the name of poetry. Marx: capitalism deranges all the senses save the sense of property.
Keeping my back against unimportant walls I moved out of range of the confusion, away from the protection of the police. Having seen nothing I could swear to I felt at peace with my default. I would, at least, not be engaged in some mess not my own.
This is what I mean though: how differently we move now, rapidly deciding what is and isn’t ours. Indifferently.
Voices
Wreathed around the entrance to a shopping mall, a student dining hall, don’t pause for a word, or to articulate an idea. What hangs a moment in the air is already dead: That’s history.
The moment—Edwin Denby describes it—when a dancer, leaping, stands still in the air. Pause in conversation when time would stop, an idea hang suspended, then get taken up and carried on. (Then that other great style of conversation: everyone at once, each possessed with an idea.) This newer conversation: I am here and talking, talking, here and talking . . . Television the first great lesson: against silence. “I thought she’d never call and I went aaah! to my friend and she went give it a week, she’ll call you all right and you did”—“ And you went waowh! and I went, right, I went O.K., it’s only I was clueless? so now can we grab something nearby, cause I’m due on in forty-five?”
window glass. “Fucking worst day of my fucking life, fucking wife left me for another man, both on coke and, you know? I don’t CARE! thought it was only maryjane she was, do you KNOW the prison term for coke? Fucking dealer, leaves me for him because she’s HOOKED and I’m supposed to CARE? Do they know what they’ll GET?”
Private urgencies made public, not collective, speaker within a bubble. In the new restaurant: “Marty? Thought I’d never get through to you. We need to move quickly with SZ-02, there are hounds on the trail. Barney won’t block you at all. Just give him what we talked about.”
USonian speech. Men of the upwardly mobilizing class needing to sound boyish, an asset in all the newness of the new: upstart, startup, adventurist, pirate lad’s nasal bravado in the male vocal cords. Voices of girls and women screeking to an excitable edge of brightness. In an excessively powerful country, grown women sound like girls without authority or experience. Male, female voices alike pitched fastforward commercial, one timbre, tempo, intonation.
Mirrors
Possible tones of the human voice, their own possible physical beauty—no recognition. The fish-eye lens bobbles faces back.
Bodies heavy with sad or enraged feminine or macho brooding mimic stand–up comics, celebrities; grimace, gesticulate. The nakedest generation of young USonians with little intuition of the human history of nakedness, luminous inventions of skin and musculature. Their surfaces needlepointed with conventionally outrageous emblems, what mirror to render justly their original beauty back to them?
You touched me in places so deep I wanted to ignore you.
Artworks (I)
Painting on a gallery wall: people dwelling on opposite sides of a pane of glass. None of their eyes exchanging looks. Yellow flashes off the rug in the room and from the orchard beyond Houses of people whose eyes do not meet.
White people doing and seeing no evil.
(Photograph of family reunion, eyes on the wide-lens camera unmeeting.) “In fact I’ve lived here all along.”
That was them not us. We were at the time in the time of our displacement, being torn from a false integrity. We stared at the pictures in the gallery knowing they were not us, we were being driven further for something else and who knew how far and for how long and what we were to do.
Stranger
Isolation begins to form, moves in like fog on a clear afternoon. Arrives with the mail, leaves its messages on the phone machine. If you hadn’t undergone this so often it could take you by surprise, but its rime-white structure is the simple blueprint of your displacement. You: who pride yourself on not giving in, keep discovering in dreams new rooms in an old house, drawing new plans: living with strangers, enough for all, wild tomato plants along the road, redness for hunger and thirst. (Unrest, too, in the house of dreams: the underworld lashing back.)
But this fog blanks echoes, blots reciprocal sounds. The padded cell of a moribund democracy, or just your individual case?
Artworks (II)
Early summer lunch with friends, talk rises: poetry, urban design and planning, film. Strands of interest and affection binding us differently around the table. If an uneasy political theme rears up—the meaning of a show of lynching photographs in New York, after Mapplethorpe’s photos, of sociopathic evil inside the California prison industry—talk fades. Not a pause but: a suppression. No one is monitoring this conversation but us. We know the air is bad in here, maybe want not to push that knowledge, ask what is to be done? How to breathe? What will suffice? Draft new structures or simply be aware? If art is our only resistance, what does that make us? If we’re collaborators, what’s our offering to corruption—an aesthetic, anaesthetic, dye of silence, withdrawal, intellectual disgust?
This fade-out/suspension of conversation: a syndrome of the past decades? our companionate immune systems under siege, viral spread of social impotence producing social silence?
Imagine written language that walks away from human conversation. A written literature, back turned to oral traditions, estranged from music and body. So what might reanimate, rearticulate, becomes less and less available.
Incline
Dreamroad rising steeply uphill; David is driving. I see it turning into a perpendicular structure salvaged from a long metal billboard: we will have to traverse this at a ninety-degree angle, then at the top go over and down the other side. There are no exits. Around is the Mojave Desert: open space. D.’s car begins to lose momentum as the incline increases; he tries shifting into a lower gear and gunning the engine. There is no way off this incline now, we’re forced into a situation we hadn’t reckoned on—a road now become something that is no road, something designated as “commercial space.” I suggest rolling (ourselves in) the car down the steep dusty shoulder into the desert below, and out. For both of us, the desert isn’t vacancy or fear, its life, a million forms of witness. The fake road, its cruel deception, is what we have to abandon.
Mission Statement
The Organization for the Abolition of Cruelty has an air deployment with bases on every continent and on obscurer tracts of land. Airstrips and hangars have been constructed to accommodate large and small aircraft for reconnoiter and rescue missions whether on polar ice or in desert or rainforest conditions. Many types of craft are of course deployed to urban clusters. The mission of the Organization is not to the First, Third, or any other World. It is directed toward the investigation and abrogation of cruelty in every direction, including present and future extraterrestrial locations.
It is obvious that the destruction of despair is still our most urgent task. In this regard, we employ paramilitary methods with great care and watchfulness.
The personnel dedicated to this new program are responsible to the mission, not to any national body. We are apprised of all new technologies as soon as available. Hence we have a unique fusion of policy and technology, unique in that its purpose is the abolition of cruelty.
Ours is the first project of its kind to be fully empowered through the new paranational charters. In principle, it is now recognized that both agents and objects of cruelty must be rescued and transformed, and that they sometimes merge into each other.
In response to your inquiry: this is a complex operation. We have a wide range of specializations and concerns. Some are especially calibrated toward language
because of its known and unknown powers
to bind and to dissociate
because of its capacity
to ostracize the speechless
because of its capacity
to nourish self-deception
because of its capacity
for rebirth and subversion
because of the history
of torture
against human speech
2000–2002
Transparencies
That the meek word like the righteous word can bully
that an Israeli soldier interviewed years
after the first Intifada could mourn on camera
what under orders he did, saw done, did not refuse
that another leaving Beit Jala could scrawl
on a wall: We are truely sorry for the mess we made
is merely routine word that would cancel deed
That human equals innocent and guilty
That we grasp for innocence whether or no
is elementary That words can translate into broken bones
That the power to hurl words is a weapon
That the body can be a weapon
any child on playground knows That asked your favorite word
in a game
you always named a thing, a quality, freedom or river
(never a pronoun never God or War)
is taken for granted That word and body
are all we have to lay on the line
That words are windowpanes in a ransacked hut, smeared
by time’s dirty rains, we might argue
likewise that words are clear as glass till the sun strikes it blinding
But that in a dark windowpane you have seen your face
That when you wipe your glasses the text grows clearer
That the sound of crunching glass comes at the height of the
wedding
That I can look through glass
into my neighbor’s house
but not my neighbor’s life
That glass is sometimes broken to save lives
That a word can be crushed like a goblet underfoot
is only what it seems, part question, part answer: how
you live it
2002
Ritual Acts
i
We are asking for books
No, not—but a list of books
to be given to young people
Well, to young poets
to guide them in their work
He gestures impatiently
They won’t read he says
My time is precious
If they want to they’ll find
whatever they need
I’m going for a walk after lunch
After that I lie down
Then and only then do I read the papers
Mornings are for work
the proofs of the second volume
—my trilogy, and he nods
And we too nod recognition
ii
The buses—packed
since the subways are forbidden
and the highways forsaken
so people bring everything on—
what they can’t do without—
Air conditioners, sculpture
Double baskets of babies
Fruit platters, crematory urns
Sacks of laundry, of books
Inflated hearts, bass fiddles
Bridal gowns in plastic bags
Pet iguanas, oxygen tanks
The tablets of Moses
iii
After all—to have loved, wasn’t that the object?
Love is the only thing in life
but then you can love too much
or the wrong way, you lose
yourself or you lose
the person
or you strangle each other
Maybe the object of love is
to have loved
greatly
at one time or another
Like a cinema trailer
watched long ago
iv
You need to turn yourself around