How blest the land that counts among
Her sons so many good and wise,
To execute great feats of tongue
When troubles rise.
Behold them mounting every stump,
By speech our liberty to guard.
Observe their courage — see them jump,
And come down hard!
In my car, driving through Black Mountain,
North Carolina, I listen to what
sounds like Doris Day shooting
heroin inside Sly Stone’ s throat.
One would think that she fights
to get out, but she wants to stay
free in this skin. Fresh,
The Family Stone’ s album,
came out in ’73, but I didn’ t make sense
of it till ’76, sixth grade for me,
the Bicentennial, I got my first kiss that year,
I beat up the class bully; I was the man.
The conversations of the French
Quarter mules in their stables
after a full day of pulling
tourists and voters over cobble-
stones is not espresso witty
and in their dark no TVs feed
them news of the ends of mules
elsewhere in the Middle East
and West. In our stables the ends
of others are a fact of atmosphere.
The yoyos on the mystery island
nextdoor are revving familiar tools
in backyard now gripped by failure
first of electricity than of
a meaner something that’ ll grow
Even tonight and I need to take a walk and clear
my head about this poem about why I can’ t
go out without changing my clothes my shoes
my body posture my gender identity my age
my status as a woman alone in the evening/
alone on the streets/alone not being the point/
the point being that I can’ t do what I want
to do with my own body because I am the wrong
What will we do
when there is nobody left
to kill?
*
40,000 gallons of oil gushing into
the ocean
But I
sit on top this mountainside above
the Pacific
checking out the flowers
the California poppies orange
as I meet myself in heat
I’ m wondering
where’ s the Indians?
At the throat of Soweto
a devil language falls
slashing
claw syllables to shred and leave
raw
the tongue of the young
girl
learning to sing
her own name
loquitur the sparrow in the Zoo
No bars are set too close, no mesh too fine
To keep me from the eagle and the lion,
Whom keepers feed that I may freely dine.
This goes to show that if you have the wit
To be small, common, cute, and live on shit,
Though the cage fret kings, you may make free with it.
September 1956
Outside the hotel window, unenlightened pigeons
weave and dive like Stukas on their prey,
apparently some tiny insect brother.
(In India, the attainment of nonviolence
is considered a proper goal for human beings.)
If one of the pigeons should fly into the illusion
Aloft between heaven and them,
I babble the landscape — what staunch, vicious trees,
what cluttered roads, slow cars. This is my
country as it was gifted me — victimless, vast.
The soundtrack buzzing the air around my ears
continually loops ditties of eagles and oil.
I can’ t choose. Every moment I’ m awake,
aroused instrumentals channel theme songs,
speaking
what I cannot.
But to whatever animal we ascribe these remains, it is certain such a one has existed in America, and that it has been the largest of all terrestrial beings. It should have sufficed to have rescued the earth it inhabited, and the atmosphere it breathed, from the imputation of impotence....
— Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia
I called for armour, rose, and did not reel.
But when I thought...
I could feel
My wound open wide.
— Thom Gunn, “The Wound”
THE STATES
