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

Requisition Article 7

I love you like the paper clips I’ve arranged
into the shape of a heart on my clandestine desk
which was given to me by the prime governor
of Sufrani during my deracinated trip to Africa
while working on several not unimportant projects

I like the way you kiss me,
it reminds me of how egregious girls
used to kiss in Nebraska farmyards
when the winter was coming
and they were hungry dogs

I enjoy the dances that you do
and the way you insist I only
give you dollar bills
even though I’m exceptionally rich

I love the deregionalised morning after
in grand hotels which they pay for;
that amelioration of categorical joy
and the epic liquidation of the individual.

I like your eyes.
they never look at me the wrong way.

I enjoy you.

I love the adventure of creeping off to mountain huts
and the 6 a.m. petit mort blues, when you sit there
in nothing but your shoes.

I like the way we smell together,
that mix of woman and cigar.

I enjoy being your representative in government
during these historic epoch-making times,
you serve your country like a soldier down in Alamo
providing veritable ease to the governors

I love telling you what to do
to me.

Shoes

when you're young
a pair of
female
high-heeled shoes
just sitting
alone
in the closet
can fire your
bones;
when you're old
it's just
a pair of shoes
without
anybody
in them
and
just as
well.

Epistle To Be Left In The Earth

...It is colder now,
                               there are many stars,
                                                                                 we are drifting
North by the Great Bear,  
                                                            the leaves are falling,
The water is stone in the scooped rocks,
                                                                 to southward
Red sun grey air:
                               the crows are
Slow on their crooked wings,
                               the jays have left us:

Long since we passed the flares of Orion.
Each man believes in his heart he will die.
Many have written last thoughts and last letters.
None know if our deaths are now or forever:
None know if this wandering earth will be found.

We lie down and the snow covers our garments.
I pray you,
                               you (if any open this writing),
Make in your mouths the words that were our names.
I will tell you all we have learned,
                               I will tell you everything:

The earth is round,
                             there are springs under the orchards,
The loam cuts with a blunt knife,
                                                                             beware of
Elms in thunder,
                                                      the lights in the sky are stars——
We think they do not see,
                                        we think also
The trees do not know nor the leaves of the grasses hear us:
The birds too are ignorant.
                                               Do not listen.
Do not stand at dark in the open windows.
We before you have heard this:
                                                               they are voices:
They are not words at all but the wind rising.
Also none among us has seen God.
(...We have thought often
The flaws of sun in the late and driving weather
Pointed to one tree but it was not so.)
As for the nights I warn you the nights are dangerous:
The wind changes at night and the dreams come.

It is very cold,
                            there are strange stars near Arcturus,

Voices are crying an unknown name in the sky.