Social commentaries

I suppose so.
I was living in an attic in Philadelphia
It became very hot in the summer and so I stayed in the
bars. I didn’ t have any money and so with what was almost left
I put a small ad in the paper and said I was a writer
looking for work...
which was a god damned lie; I was a writer
looking for a little time and a little food and some
attic rent.
a couple days later when I finally came home
from somewhere
the landlady said, there was somebody looking for
you. and I said,

O lord, he said, Japanese women,
real women, they have not forgotten,
bowing and smiling
closing the wounds men have made;
but American women will kill you like they
tear a lampshade,
American women care less than a dime,
they’ ve gotten derailed,
they’ re too nervous to make good:
always scowling, belly-aching,
disillusioned, overwrought;
but oh lord, say, the Japanese women:
there was this one,
I came home and the door was locked
and when I broke in she broke out the bread knife

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

As if sliding down the green, scuffed face
of the wave, a seaplane falls
and turns together, keeping the waters of

the ear flat: a dead calm. But when the window’ s
frowning strip of shoreline,
the battalions of tropical-drinks umbrellas

guarding the sandcastles and saltboxes
of the rich,
when these flip upside down, and the pale

Because she died where the ravine falls into water.

Because they dragged her down to the creek.

In death, she wore her blue broadcloth skirt.

Though frost blanketed the grass she cooled her feet in the spring.

Because I turned the log with my foot.

Her slippers floated downstream into the dam.

Because, after the thaw, the hunters discovered her body.

Because she lived without our mother.

Because she had inherited head rights for oil beneath the land.

She was carrying his offspring.

What did the Old Doctor do
in a cattle car
riding to Treblinka on the 5th of August
over a few hours of   blood flow
over the dirty river of time

I do not know

What did Charon the volunteer do
ferryman without an oar
did he give the children the remains
of   his breath
and leave for himself
just the shiver in the bones

I do not know

Did he lie to them for instance
in small numbing
doses
picking from their sweaty heads
the skittish lice of   fear

I do not know

The evidence was in and it went to the contrary.
The contrary wound around us rather like a river.
The river reacted, spider-like, tangling up its legs
with other wet parts we thought we knew,
such as creeks and fjords and deltas and such.

A beaver sits on the riverbank watching all of this unfold.
He doesn’ t know what a fjord is, and he doesn’ t care
for other waters, or even other beavers, or the merest
hint of other business, so he removes this evidence.

Kitten curious, or roaring down drinks
in Soho sumps, small hours tour buses,
satellite station green rooms, or conked

out in the bathtubs of motorway hotels,
there you were, with muck-about kisses,
sharking for the snappers, before hell

If only I could forget him, the Frenchman
I saw outside our quarters, creeping round
near daybreak in that density of garden
as if he'd almost grown into the ground.
He was just looking back, peering about him
to check that he was safe here and alone:
once he was sure, his plunder was all his!
Whatever chanced, he'd not be moving on.

Girl shouting Oliver! at the top of the cut-through
by Jacob’ s Gallery, you have now entered
the slenderest of histories, the skin-bound book
I store between my temples; in that mean
and moonless city, you must hang fraught
in your too-long coat, not a winner, but placed,
and in this cutty version of forever, forever
calling on your unseen beau, one flake in
a limbic blizzard, one spark in the synaptic blaze.
And now the rain turns, light but going steady
on the Willamette. Along the bank, I lift my pace