History & Politics

from Don't Let Me Be Lonely: “I don't usually talk to strangers...”

I don't usually talk to strangers, but it is four o'clock and I can't get a cab. I need a cab because I have packages, but it's four o'clock and all the cabs are off duty. They are making a shift change. At the bus stop I say, It's hard to get a cab now. The woman standing next to me glances over without turning her head. She faces the street where cab after cab drives by with its light off. She says, as if to anyone, It's hard to live now. I don't respond. Hers is an Operation Iraqi Freedom answer.

The Last Son of China

.......................    hello hello hello   ...    Weiwei   ...    where have you been?   ...    I see you in dreams   ...    bleeding   ...    in the darkness of the sun   ...    81 spots in the flame   ...    each a nightmare one cannot wake up from   ...    Weiwei   ...    the last son   ...    you told me as we said goodbye   ...    your last night on the Lower East Side   ...    未未   ...    the last child of your Mother and Father   ...    born in the labor camp   ...    exiled from Beijing to the far desert   ...    watching your Father clean public latrines for singing the truth  

Envoy to Palestine

I’ ve come to this one grassy hill
in Ramallah, off Tokyo Street,
to place a few red anemones
& a sheaf of wheat on Darwish’ s grave.
A borrowed line transported me beneath
a Babylonian moon & I found myself
lucky to have the shadow of a coat
as warmth, listening to a poet’ s song
of Jerusalem, the hum of a red string
Caesar stole off Gilgamesh’ s lute.
I know a prison of sunlight on the skin.
The land I come from they also dreamt
before they arrived in towering ships

Exuberance

Exuberance sips bootleg gin from a garter flask
with a ruby monogram “E.”

She wears a red dress one size too small,
eyes wide, she flirts with everyone, dares

Lincoln Beachey to fly until he runs out of gas,
rides a dead engine all the way down.

She watches Ormer Locklear climb
out of the cockpit two hundred feet up,

tap dance on his upper wing
as the houses of  honest families

with their square-fenced yards
slide below his shuffle. An oval pond

winks in the sun, like a zero.
Exuberance challenges pilots

Robinson Escapes to the Cape for Independence Day

O little-know facts — how Robinson attracts them!

Pilgrims rocked ashore here, before Plymouth Rock.

The word scrimshaw is of unknown origin.

The stock name of the archaic two-lane main road? Route 6A. Really
it’ s Old King’ s Highway.

Some facts are useless: the paper bag was invented in Dennis.

Some facts are not: Wellfleet’ s town clock sings out ship’ s time.

19th century Americans observed only three holidays. The Fourth of
July was one.

O witty aperçus — how Robinson accrues them!

Beowulf (modern English translation)

LO, praise of the prowess of people-kings
of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,
we have heard, and what honor the athelings won!
Oft Scyld the Scefing from squadroned foes,
from many a tribe, the mead-bench tore,
awing the earls. Since erst he lay
friendless, a foundling, fate repaid him:
for he waxed under welkin, in wealth he throve,
till before him the folk, both far and near,
who house by the whale-path, heard his mandate,
gave him gifts: a good king he!
To him an heir was afterward born,

What Is (War)

And if all those who meet or even
hear of you become witness to what you are —

a white country of blight beneath the last snows of
spring. Could we remain quiet on earth

and bear it, the war we make inside
what is — it’ s a long time to be here, to be still,

to feel the rot inside now — bone-scrap, char, sheets of stars
at the edge of a field where we are once again

taken from ourselves. Could we remain here,
witness to grief, one last bright dire call-and-reply,

Song of Myself (1892 version)

1
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’ d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Tender Arrivals

Where ever something breathes
Heart beating the rise and fall
Of mountains, the waves upon the sky
Of seas, the terror is our ignorance, that’ s
Why it is named after our home, earth
Where art is locked between
Gone and Destination
The destiny of some other where and feeling
The ape knew this, when his old lady pulled him up
Off the ground. Was he grateful, ask him he’ s still sitting up there
Watching the sky’ s adventures, leaving two holes for his own. Oh sing

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