There’s one bastard that Death doesn't yet want --
A man He's content to smilingly haunt,
To assure that he hasn't forgotten
What comes. "Maybe when your mind's most rotten,"
He whispers from behind the sickroom door.
The man, a murdering conquistador,
And raper of the widows of the poor,
Cut a priest's throat to settle an old score,
And sold babies to feed a king's prize boar.
Delectable crimes for Death -- no reason
Not to take this human in his season.
His disgust is with the miser's grasping
Love of Death’s own hot and eternal sting.
I drew a high number the last year of the draft,
But a childhood disease would have kept me 4-F.
I have a misshapen hip and couldn't force-march
Or negotiate a pitching deck, fore to aft.
I lost no friend or brothers to war; no one left
My high school to volunteer; no triumphal arch,
No memorial was erected in our town,
No first-hand accounts of battle were written down.
The nightly news showed all there was to see of death
And defeat: we lose each war the minute one man
Fails to open his eyes or to take a next breath,
And new wars start soon enough, because they can.
We launch and drop bombs and bombs and more bombs,
Generously, Samaritans offering alms.
A beam of light cutting the skin of space
travels at the speed of time to the beginning,
the end of things, seeing everything between,
without being seen.
Or a single photon released into a sphere
lined with silver, instantaneously covering
all of space, repeating that cold cycle endlessly,
as if someone might see.
It is a discrete miracle, like a man’s soul,
a point on a continuum proliferating one day
to saturate the universe with something better
than gas, heat, matter.
It is moonlight, the boxes sketched on the floor
at two thirty three in the morning, a lighter
shade of light. Watch it turn the earth.
It is promiscuous,
infecting its neighbors, or looking to.
It stretches across the sky like an eyelid
and proliferates color like a drug dream.
It splits the prism
into living spectra, dulls the magnifying glass,
blanches the dead leaf, burns the cloud white;
it is nothing at all—until it strikes something.
Here is Purgatory too: vines and flowers
Extend from a woman's neck, but her legs wander
Away beneath a shower of black holy blood.
A chemo spirit struts, though she's lost her powers
To console or restore the faith others squander,
Lost all but her rage to escape the coming flood.
Little live hands reach through the clouds yearning to touch
What they can't comprehend, like the Klein-bottle-brained
Devil with the tied shoestring eyes, who knows too much.
He is no god, this clown, though he has often reigned.
Both the Truth and the liars are hidden
And will not come forth to speak unbidden
By necessity’s will or convenience,
Unless called for by fakery of sense.
At the bottom of a stinking dry well —
Half way, the easy half, from here to Hell —
Where nakedness — dear Truth — shivers and sighs —
Will Emptiness stitch golden clothes of lies.
He emerges to strut in his glory.
Every sentence he spouts is a story.
The Truth, her bruised body cleansed at least,
Climbs out to the reception of a beast.
They beat and rape her, drag her by her hair,
Throw her back into the well, her dark lair.
The job is done, the murder weapon stashed;
A beautiful young woman bashed and slashed.
The killer and his partners listen intently,
Moved to inaction by a simple song
A woman sings with soft intensity,
As if her passion could efface a wrong
Perpetrated with mountainous cruelty.
Will speechless bystanders be sufficient
To subdue the heartless secret agent?
The song is over, yet they hesitate.
Three observers, representing the State,
All alike, unblinkingly accuse us
Of the action's unconscionable causes.
There is much more for us to do than wait.
I rarely walk beyond that tree
That is home to birds —
And air — too close
To the undermined
Riverbank.
I’ve tried holding
The tree — hands uncertain—
Taking a step —only one —
A test of courage —
A test of foolishness.
Even at flood height
The water invites —
And seems — at times —
To flow in reverse — back
Up between its banks —
I follow from here.
A man isn’t a man without being a fool,
At least that’s what the Fool learned in idiot school.
As if lethal it’s called a “loon fallout”:
The migrating birds wing so high,
Their feathers grow heavy with ice
(Instinct won’t drive them a warmer route)
And they drop, too encumbered to fly.
Their backs are black, dotted like dice.
They aren’t able to walk on the ground.
Red eyes glare, fish-spearing beaks clack.
Their dusk-born two-note wails don’t sound.
If rescued (which they fight), taken back
To water, they’ll drown in a small pond.
They need a quarter mile and beyond,
Wings thrashing, feet running on water,
Or they’ll stall, and all flying will falter.
Hannah Arendt: monstrous acts can be committed by ordinary people who simply stop thinking, obey orders, and fail to exercise empathy or moral judgment.
Top-hatted crows fly single file to roost,Who sets the giraffes on fire, strips the maidens bare?
Who shovels corpses into his watery lair?
Who puts breath into a breasted horse-headed bust
And grinds all of mankind's fillings into gold dust?
(We knew the real monster at once — failing student
Who could dissect a soul with a few rude insights,
Trepan their insecurities, vices, and fears.
He'd laugh as he gave each of them the treatment.
They'd laugh, but each felt secretly he might be right.
Too timid to see the truth, they were his mirrors.)
He gathers at red draped altars to contemplate
Not who we are but what perversions to create.
The monster exists to give us a thrill, a scare,
Which is why we invented him -- no one is there.
We've all been asleep for 100 years,
So, when we wake, vigorously alive,
As the creeping armies of night arrive,
We will wash them out to sea with our tears.
The cannibals will have themselves to eat.
The king and queen will summon a piper
To drive away the thorn and the viper,
But hear only their own hearts cease to beat.
What we will make of our new universe
Depends (like the fine point of a spindle)
On how much pain or love we will kindle.
Will we invite a new, more evil curse?
Sleep on, nothing will happen while we do.
The prince's kiss has changed into a moue.
The stones think as though they are thought silence.
Ask the big guy and he'll mouth a nothing
We’re sure will seem like astounding nonsense,
As if a pretty rock knew how to sing.
He assumes you will understand the sound,
At least that it was real, if not profound.
His minor lobe chatters like a mad bird,
Ideas made sentences like light made seen,
Each thought a secret of the grand absurd,
Pitched higher when it's noble or obscene.
We never speak or look at each other.
What an obfuscation that would create!
Each thought like second thought would obviate
The first, like Cain gunning down his brother.
