Sunday, April 10, 2011

The People Yes

The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:

This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can't be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can't hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
"Where to? what next?"

Tenderness

Back then when so much was clear
and I hadn't learned
young men learn from women

what it feels like to feel just right,
I was twenty-three,
she thirty-four, two children, a husband

in prison for breaking someone's head.
Yelled at, slapped
around, all she knew of tenderness

was how much she wanted it, and all
I knew
were back seats and a night or two

in a sleeping bag in the furtive dark.
We worked
in the same office, banter and loneliness

leading to the shared secret
that to help
National Biscuit sell biscuits

was wildly comic, which led to my body
existing with hers
like rain that's found its way underground

to water it naturally joins.
I can't remember
ever saying the exact word, tenderness,

though she did. It's a word I see now
you must be older to use,
you must have experienced the absence of it

often enough to know what silk and deep balm
it is
when at last it comes. I think it was terror

at first that drove me to touch her
so softly,
then selfishness, the clear benefit

of doing something that would come back
to me twofold,
and finally, sometime later, it became

reflexive and motiveless in the high
ignorance of love.
Oh abstractions are just abstract

until they have an ache in them. I met
a woman never touched
gently, and when it ended between us

I had new hands and new sorrow,
everything it meant
to be a man changed, unheroic, floating.

ygUDuh

ygUDuh

ydoan
yunnuhstan


ydoan o
yunnuhstand dem
yguduh ged


yunnuhstan dem doidee
yguduh ged riduh
ydoan o nudn


LISN bud LISN


dem
gud
am


lidl yelluh bas
tuds weer goin


duhSIVILEYEzum

We've come to expect

We've come to expect earthquakes, fires, hurricanes,
and tidal waves from our whitecoated brothers
whose laboratories shed radiation
on land and landscape,

disabling cities. Foresighted citizens
outfit granite arks in Idaho's brown hills,
stocked against flood, famine, pestilence, war, and
hunger of neighbors,

with bulgur, freeze-dried Stroganoff, and Uzis.
Let's remember: Our great-grandfathers holed up
in mountains with pistols and pemmican, their
manhood sufficient,

should they avoid peritonitis and gangrene,
to perform the mechanic alchemy
which liquefied landscape, dirt to nuggets, and
sluiced a state golden.

Let's remember not only the local wars
over claims but a late conflict of siblings
in aristocracy and the stock market,
sharing destruction.

Or recollect the brothers who stayed back east
laboring in the shoe factory, or their
bosses who summered hunting in Scotland and
reside forever

in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome
among cats, the pyramid of Cestius,
and Keats's grave. What use are those forefathers
to our condition?

We want comfort: Shall we consult Jefferson?
Alas, he's busy conducting a call-in
show for Republican-Democrats. Franklin?
He is occupied

obliterating SIN from Webster's project.
If we approach doddering George Washington,
he only smiles at us in his foolishness.
Shall we call upon

Abraham Lincoln for succor? No: The Great
Emancipator succumbs to Grant's whiskey.
As we approach the present, passing double
Roosevelts, we do

not help ourselves - not with old Eisenhower
cursing at caddies; not with Nixon cursing.
But if we return past Jonathan Edwards,
past Cotton Mather,

to the Israelites of the Mayflower -
who make covenant with Jehovah's promised
wilderness and the manna of Indian
corn, who stay secure

in Adam's fall and the broken promises
of the remnant - we discover ancestors
appropriate to our lapsarian state:
Their rage sustains us