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?"
Sunday, April 10, 2011
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.
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
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
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
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