As soon as any earthly sovereign
Receives a slight in his own estimation,
“You are the enemy---” he tells his nation,
“---Of this or that king! Go and do him in!”
His people, eager to avoid the pen
Or some such pleasantry I will not mention,
Hoist muskets and ship out with the intention
Of making war on French or Englishmen.
So, for some martinet’s fantastic whims,
The sheep come stumbling back into the stall
With broken skulls and mutilated limbs.
They toss their lives as children toss a ball,
As if that old whore, Death, who lops and trims
The human race, comes only when we call.
2/ The Spaniard
A Spaniard claimed that everything in Rome---
Its churches, castles, its antiquities,
Its fountains, columns, palaces---all these
Were equaled or improved upon at home.
To put him down and keep myself amused,
I one day went and bought at the bazaar
Inside the Pantheon a hefty pair
Of testicles a sheep had lately used.
I boxed them up quite nicely and I had him
Take a good look. I said: “These very ballocks
Are the same two that once belonged to Adam.”
He first seemed quite astounded by my trick,
And then he said: “These are impressive relics,
But in my country, we’ve got Adam’s prick.”
3/ The Coffee House Philosopher
Men are the same, on our little sphere,
As coffee beans poured in the coffee mill;
One leads, one follows, one brings up the rear,
But a single fate is waiting for them all.
Often they change their places in the parade,
The greater beans displace the weak and small,
And all press toward the exit with its blade,
Through which, ground into powder, they must spill.
The hand of fortune stirs them all together,
And that is how men live here with their fellows,
Going around in circles with each other,
Lost in the depths, or struggling in the shallows,
Not comprehending what or why or whether,
Until death lifts his little cup and swallows.
III/ Near Jeffrey’s Hook
The Twentieth Century in Photographs
Different faces, formats all the same:
A profile set beside a frontal view
And nothing else included in the frame
Save, at the bottom, for a coded row
Of numbers dashes letters that replaces
A name best left unsaid by those who knew it.
Two aspects of one face there, not two faces.
Behind each is a blank wall, we intuit,
More like an edge each one could be tipped over,
Once photographed. Impossible to read
These inexpressive faces and recover
The thoughts of those who have been so long dead,
Who died, in fact, before the photographer
Had time to fix them in his clear solution.
Although their eyes meet ours now, we are
Still not there yet: no stay of execution.
Poem for the Millennium
Prophets proclaim the perfected hour,
Extinctions everywhere endanger survival,
Terminate the terrestrial tenure of mankind:
Off on a tiny atom-bombed atoll,
On our waste waters a dragon waxes,
A saurian sprung from seed mutated
Becomes a behemoth that blocks out the sun,
As it lifts off on loathsome leathery wings,
Eager to seize and sack our cities;
The anxious await an asteroid’s impact,
While Gaia groans at the gaping earth
And fires flicker from faults long-hidden,
Deep as all delving; in utter darkness
The earth’s shelves shift and shatter,
Drifting apart; dormant volcanoes
Revive and vent their viscous magma;
Great walls of water wash beaches away;
A terrible toll is taken in lives.
Now, at the New Year another menace:
A viral invader evades our defenses,
And stunned computers convulse and crash;
The bright screens before us go blank at once,
Their voices vanish into the void.
The match is struck: strife and disorder
Spread from the cities out to their suburbs
Of merchandise malls and manicured lawns
Wend their way to the trackless woods
Where bearded boors in faded blue jeans
And flannel shirts feast upon freeze-dried
Provender pressed into packets of tinfoil,
Endlessly brooding on engines of evil
And hatching horrors under their hats.
Some faintest flaw sends feelers out,
A hairline fault finds its way to the surface;
The cleft becomes a network of crackling,
And the vase shivers, shocked into shards:
Chaos increasing causes such failures.
Lightly leaping a break in the line,
With woven words we ward it off
Over the silence: caesura that stands for
The fell fissure we feel underfoot.
Who Knows What’s Best?
I am the decider and I decide what’s best.
—George W. Bush
1/
The ones we bomb to liberate
Have really got an attitude:
Despite the care we demonstrate
The ones we bomb to liberate
From tyranny respond with hate:
How’s that for sheer ingratitude?
The ones we bomb to liberate
Have really got an attitude.
2/
And those we torture to set free
Have got no cause to sigh and groan:
As we export democracy
The ones we torture to set free
Are stripped of human dignity
In prisons no worse than our own.
No, those we torture to set free
Have got no cause to sigh and groan.
3/
And what is all this fuss about
Who knows what’s best? The ones in charge,
Believe me, don’t have any doubt.
Say what? Is all this fuss about
The liberties we trample out?
Our nation’s powerful and large,
So what is all this fuss about?
Who knows what’s best? The ones in charge.
Getting Carded
We couldn’t know what we would lose
When the ENDANGERED SPECIES sign
Began to turn up in our zoos---
A small white card propped up on a
Shelf in front of the cage or pen
Of one selected for this honor,
Translated from its habitat
Into a compact modern flat.
By what ENDANGERED, or by whom,
It couldn’t know until too late:
One day it woke up in this room
Where it patrols compulsively
The borders of its shrunken state
And stares at what it cannot see:
Far dominions, other powers.
Its glance keeps on avoiding ours.
You wonder why it didn’t learn,
Although, quite frankly, it seems not
Even to share your mild concern.
Time to move on: the fourth grade class
Behind us wants to claim our spot
And press its faces to the glass.
We leave ENDANGERED and its text
And wonder who’ll get carded ne
xt.
For the End of the Age of Irony
Why, if it’s gone now, is there this leftover
ambience seeping into and staining the
fabric of our conversation,
like red wine spilled on the bone-white sofa?
Though its infrequent sightings are treated as
cases of mere mistaken identity,
and though its age may now be ended,
it seems that irony’s not quite done for---
one old employer pays it occasional
visits on Sundays, riding a trolley car
out to the suburbs where it lingers,
though much diminished, as he informs us:
“Odd to contrast its formerly vigorous
habits of growth, its flourishing presence in
those lives to which it once seemed central,
with its now-marginal situation
off in the corner, fusty leaves withering---
if only we’d remembered to water it
every so often, yes, if only
with our crocodile tears, if only ….”
Such insincere remorse may remind you of
how you enjoyed the late Donald Justice’s
version of Baudelaire’s evasive
elegy made for the clumsy servant,
wondering only whether the French version
should be preferred for its insincerity
over the translator’s nostalgia
for those emotions he never suffered.
It may seem strange that an inability
to speak of irony without irony
argues more clearly for its value
than any argument it’s not part of,
or that nostalgia is the more keenly felt
out of proportion to the experience
causing it, as a magnifying
lens will make any poor micro, macro.
But you were always taken with artifice,
drawn to it like a sow to a truffle bed,
weren’t you, finding it a refuge
from the unbearably lofty motive,
as from the unendurable punditry
of those whom mere self-interest animates;
you saw it deftly undermining
acres of wind-powered bloviators,
and noticed how, when we get too serious
in its defense, it vanishes utterly;
ironists surely would consider
such an odd outcome as---well, ironic.
Better to leave its fragile and fugitive
self to recover, with our negligence
offering all it really needs for
any eventual restoration:
which someone someday (on one reality,
many perspectives) will lightly illustrate
merely by letting you know that the
beautiful necktie you’re wearing, isn’t.
Near Jeffrey’s Hook
1/
No one is living here now who can say
What it was once called by the Lenapé,
Who must have given it a proper name
Before the Dutchmen and the British came.
They lived here lightly, nourished on demand,
And signified their tenure of the land
With firesites, with mounds of oyster shells,
Flint arrowheads, clay bowls, dog burials---
Remnants that come to light now and again.
Their present was as it had always been
While ours isn’t what it used to be,
So we imagine what we cannot see:
Propulsive figures in a bark canoe
Whose blades divide the river’s stream in two,
Now gliding skillfully along the shore,
An image from a present long before.
2/
We see what they could never have imagined:
One Eighty-first Street’s still-evolving pageant
Of up and coming keeps on coming up,
Bright oddments caught in a kaleidoscope---
A single orange skin, expertly twirled
Will wrap itself three times around the world!
Here are peeled oranges in plastic sacks,
Electric storefronts filled with shirts and slacks
Advertised at nearly wholesale prices;
Here someone peddles sugar-syrup ices,
And in the window next door is a frieze
Of chickens spitted on rotisseries;
---And if the river where the street concludes
No longer summons up archaic moods,
On certain evenings it reflects Monet’s
Sunsets of pinks and oily, buttery grays . . .
3/
We thought that what was possible must be,
Moved to invention by the necessity
Of finding needs that inventions satisfied:
Necessity might be a stream too wide
To get the goods across in half an hour.
As we became more certain of our power,
We couldn’t help but act on what we knew:
The inconvenience of the river grew
More noticeable until everyone
Agreed that something really must be done:
A river, though it isn’t real estate,
Can be exploited just like real estate.
Laid end-to-end, sticks of dynamite filled
The hollow tubes mechanically drilled
Into Manhattan’s ancient upper crust,
Which cracked up in a sudden cloud of dust.
4/
The river yields, whatever its intention,
To engineering’s silver-spanned suspension …
Blasting left floors and windows all askew
In buildings that went up in all the new
Neighborhoods along the northwest ridge,
A bonus from construction of the Bridge.
Five years ago we moved to one such, built
In 1925. A perceptible tilt
Was proven when we let a marble roll
From one room to another down the hall
Until it stopped to listen by the door,
Explosions having modified the floor
Three quarters of a century ago.
Further explosions brought a steady flow
Of refugees into the neighborhood,
Fleeing the tyranny of race and blood.
5/
Locked in the languages they spoke from birth,
And as unable to assert their worth
To the indifferent here as to resume
The lives they might have died escaping from,
They’d long since learned that all they had been born to
Was now replaced by nothing to return to,
Yet they were fortunate, they understood,
From what they’d learned of fortunes, bad and good.
The small, dark woman in the old cafe
Below the Cloisters brought a silver tray
Of sweets and coffee, placing it before
The man who feared a stranger at his door;
And he who ate and drank that afternoon
Had no idea that he was served by one
Who day by day rebuilt her life, yet might
Still wake herself with her own screams at night.
6/
The German Jews and the Dominicans
Were followed here by actors and musicians
From more expensive neighborhoods, intent
On finding a lge apt, rv vu, low rent.
We followed them, their violins and basses
And sundry other instruments in cases
Up the escalator at One Eighty-first
And out onto the street where they dispersed,
Drawn by the life that goes on after work;
Or walked with them across Fort Bennett Park
Until, whether in couples or alone,
They sought a privacy much like our own,
Sustainable for those who
do not mind
The paradox that freedom lies behind
A triple-locked door in an uncertain hall.
(It is called an apartment, after all.)
7/
Here is the river flowing as it will,
Here and beyond us always, never still,
Sustaining and sustainable for now.
---No need for us to work things out or through
When it has done that for us, as it seems,
And offers its assurances in dreams.
Tonight, it’s somehow risen to our floor
And slides between the threshold and the door---
Is it rehearsing for some future case?
A window opens on another space
That we, only by leaning out into,
Can draw within: a partial river view
And a corner of the bridge, brilliantly lit
By nighttime traffic passing over it---
An image held, as we return to sleep
Of knees and elbows crouching for the leap.
Foreboding
(After Alfred Kubin, Die Ahnung, 1906)
What dark form has awoken
over the sleeping village
in the early morning chill?
It will have no rest until
below lie only broken
bodies among the pillage.
After 9/11
We lived in an apartment on the ridge
Running along Manhattan’s northwest side,
On a street between the Cloisters and the Bridge,
On a hill George Washington once fortified
To keep his fledglings from the juggernaut
Cumbrously rolling toward them. Many died
When those defenses failed, and where they fought
Are now a ball field and a set of swings
In an urban park: old men lost in thought
Advance their pawns against opponents’ kings
Or gossip beneath a sycamore’s branches
All afternoon until the sunset brings
The teenagers to occupy their benches.
The park makes little of its history,
With only traces of the walls or trenches
Disputed, died by, and surrendered; we
Tread on the outline of a parapet
Pressed into the asphalt unassertively,
And on a wall descending to the street,
Observe a seriously faded plaque
Acknowledging a still-unsettled debt.
What strength of memory can summon back
That ghostly army of fifteen year olds
Signs & Wonders Page 3