More praise for Adrienne Rich and The School Among the Ruins
"Trust Rich, a clarion poet of conscience, to get the fractured timbre of the times just right in a collection of vigorous lyric poems about the first four years of the twenty-first century, a period of terror, war, corporate imperialism, outrageous lies, and miasmal inarticulateness. A moment in history, Rich avers, in arresting imagery and flinty syntax, in which language has been processed into banality just like so much of the American landscape. Forthright, precise, witty, and keenly attuned to complacency, reluctance, and fear, Rich fights back with exhilaratingly choreographed poems about inane, high-pitched public cell-phone conversations, television's numbing soundtrack, the crude over-simplification and commercialization of public discourse, and the 'viral / spread of social impotence producing social silence.'"
—Booklist, starred review
"Comprising works from 2000 to 2004, the book makes acute observations about language, American identity, and the catastrophes of war. Whether lamenting the garishness of modern culture or condemning the war on terror, Rich remains a poet of impeccable principle and unwavering conscience."
—San Francisco Weekly
"The School Among the Ruins is by turns witty, touching, engaging and a ringing call to political action."
—Washington Blade
"This kind of writing is hard work, as George W. Bush might say,…but we are fortunate to have Rich in the trenches."
—Time Out New York
"More than the objects we've taken into the new century, Rich questions how we will speak of them—with what poetry? 'Who knows where it goes,' she asks in 'Apollinaire & Brassens.' Wherever it goes, let's hope Rich's principled voice and vision will continue to play a part in it."
—International Jerusalem
"Doubt—and its distant cousin, fear—are part in parcel to writing about the American experiment.…No poet has engaged her doubt so consistently and so wisely in the past half century as Adrienne Rich.…[The School Among the Ruins] reveals her at her anguished best, speaking out of compassion without ever climbing onto a soap box…. There is something relentless to Rich's drive to open our eyes. But it is keeping with her artistic credo…it does not allow us a place to hide from injustice."
—San Antonio Express
"Still harvesting both awards and controversy, [Rich] has become a seer for our times…. Her lyrical touch is as assured as ever…. A latter-day Cassandra, prepared, on occasion, to jettison her beloved lyricism on the hope of shocking us into self-knowledge."
—Jewish Quarterly
BY ADRIENNE RICH
What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics
The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems 1950–2000
Fox: Poems 1998–2000
Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations
Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995–1998
Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995
Collected Early Poems 1950–1970
An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–1991
Time's Power: Poems 1985–1988
Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979–1985
Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems
Sources
A Wild Patience Has Taken Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978–1981
On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978
The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977
Twenty-one Love Poems
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
Poems: Selected and New, 1950–1974
Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971–1972
The Will to Change
Leaflets
Necessities of Life
Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law
The Diamond Cutters
A Change of World
ADRIENNE RICH
THE SCHOOL AMONG THE RUINS
POEMS
2000–2004
W • W • NORTON & COMPANY
NEW YORK • LONDON
Copyright © 2004 by Adrienne Rich
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
Production manager: Amanda Morrison
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rich, Adrienne Cecile.
The school among the ruins: poems, 2000–2004 / Adrienne Rich.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-393-07077-4
I. Title.
PS3535.I233S36 2004
811'.54—dc22
2004008370
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
FOR JEAN VALENTINE
CONTENTS
I
Centaur's Requiem
Equinox
Tell Me
For June, in the Year 2001
The School Among the Ruins
This evening let's
Variations on Lines from a Canadian Poet
Delivered Clean
The Eye
There Is No One Story and One Story Only
II
USONIAN JOURNALS 2000
III
TERRITORY SHARED
Address
Transparencies
Livresque
Collaborations
Ritual Acts
Point in Time
IV
ALTERNATING CURRENT
Sometimes I'm back in that city
No bad dreams. Night, the bed, the faint clockface
Take one, take two
What's suffered in laughter in aroused afternoons
A deluxe blending machine
As finally by wind or grass
When we are shaken out
V
Memorize This
The Painter's House
After Apollinaire & Brassens
Slashes
Trace Elements
Bract
VI
DISLOCATIONS: SEVEN SCENARIOS
1 Still learning the word
2 In a vast dystopic space the small things
3 City and world: this infection drinks like a drinker
4 For recalcitrancy of attitude
5 Faces in the mesh: defiance or disdain
6 Not to get up and go back to the drafting table
7 Tonight someone will sleep in a stripped apartment
VII
Five O'Clock, January 2003
Wait
Don't Take Me
To Have Written the Truth
Screen Door
VIII
TENDRIL
Notes on the Poems
Acknowledgments
I
CENTAUR'S REQUIEM
Your hooves drawn together underbelly
shoulders in mud your mane
of wisp and soil deporting all the horse of you
your longhaired neck
eyes jaw yes and ears
unforgivably human on such a creature
unforgivably what you are
deposited in the grit-kicked field of a champion
tender neck and nostrils teacher water-lily suction-spot
what you were marvelous we could not stand
Night drops an awaited storm
driving in to wreck your path
Foam on your hide like flowers
where you fell or fall desire
2001
EQUINOX
Time split like a fruit between dark and light
and a usual fog drags
over this landfall
I've walked September end to end
barefoot room to room
carrying in hand a knife well honed for cutting stem or root
or wick eyes open
to abalone shells memorial candle flames
split lemons roses laid
along charring logs Gorgeous things:
: dull acres of developed land as we had named it: Nowhere
wetland burnt garbage looming at its heart
gunmetal thicket midnightblue blood and
tricking masks I thought I knew
history was not a novel
So can I say it was not I listed as Innocence
betrayed you serving (and protesting always)
the motives of my government
thinking we'd scratch out a place
where poetry old subversive shape
grew out of Nowhere here?
where skin could lie on skin
a place "outside the limits"
Can say I was mistaken?
To be so bruised: in the soft organs skeins of consciousness
Over and over have let it be
damage to others crushing of the animate core
that tone-deaf cutloose ego swarming the world
so bruised: heart spleen long inflamed ribbons of the guts
the spine's vertical necklace swaying
Have let it swarm
through us let it happen
as it must, inmost
but before this: long before this those other eyes
frontally exposed themselves and spoke
2001
TELL ME
1
Tell me, why way toward dawn the body
close to a body familiar as itself
chills—tell me, is this the hour
remembered if outlived
as freezing—no, don't tell me
Dreams spiral birdwinged overhead
a peculiar hour the silver mirror-frame's
quick laugh the caught light-lattice on the wall
as a truck drives off before dawn
headlights on
Not wanting to
write this up for the public not wanting
to write it down in secret
just to lie here in this cold story
feeling it trying to feel it through
2
Blink and smoke, flicking with absent nail
at the mica bar
where she refills without asking
Crouch into your raingarb this will be a night
unauthorized shock troops are abroad
this will be a night
the face-ghosts lean
over the banister
declaring the old stories all
froze like beards or frozen margaritas
all the new stories taste of lukewarm
margaritas, lukewarm kisses
3
From whence I draw this: harrowed in defeats of language
in history to my barest marrow
This: one syllable then another
gropes upward
one stroke laid on another
sound from one throat then another
never in the making
making beauty or sense
always mis-taken, draft, roughed-in
only to be struck out
is blurt is roughed-up
hot keeps body
in leaden hour
simmering
2001
FOR JUNE, IN THE YEAR 2001
The world's quiver and shine
I'd clasp for you forever
jetty vanishing into pearlwhite mist
western sunstruck water-light
Touch food to the lips
let taste never betray you
cinnamon vanilla melting
on apple tart
but what you really craved:
a potency of words
Driving back from Berkeley
880's brute dystopia
I was at war with words
Later on C-Span: Tallahassee:
words straight to the point:
One person, one vote
No justice, no peace
it could lift you by the hair
it could move you like a wind
it could take you by surprise
as sudden Canada geese
took us by the marina
poised necks and alert
attitudes of pause
Almost home I wanted
you to smell the budding acacias
tangled with eucalyptus
on the road to Santa Cruz
2002
THE SCHOOL AMONG THE RUINS
Beirut. Baghdad. Sarajevo. Bethlehem. Kabul. Not of course here.
1
Teaching the first lesson and the last
—great falling light of summer will you last
longer than schooltime?
When children flow
in columns at the doors
BOYS GIRLS and the busy teachers
open or close high windows
with hooked poles drawing darkgreen shades
closets unlocked, locked
questions unasked, asked, when
love of the fresh impeccable
sharp-pencilled yes
order without cruelty
a street on earth neither heaven nor hell
busy with commerce and worship
young teachers walking to school
fresh bread and early-open foodstalls
2
When the offensive rocks the sky when nightglare
misconstrues day and night when lived-in
rooms from the upper city
tumble cratering lower streets
cornices of olden ornament human debris
when fear vacuums out the streets
When the whole town flinches
blood on the undersole thickening to glass
Whoever crosses hunched knees bent a contested zone
knows why she does this suicidal thing
School's now in session day and night
children sleep
in the classrooms teachers rolled close
3
How the good teacher loved
his school the students
the lunchroom with fresh sandwiches
lemonade and milk
the classroom glass cages
of moss and turtles
teaching responsibility
A morning breaks without bread or fresh-poured milk
parents or lesson plans
diarrhea first question of the day
children shivering it's September
Second question: where is my mother?
4
One: I don't know where your mother
is Two: I don't know
why they are trying to hurt us
Three: or the latitude and longitude
of their hatred Four: I don't know if we
hate them as much I think there's more toilet paper
in the supply closet I'm going to break it open
Today this is your lesson:
write as clearly as you can
your name home street and number
down on this page
No you can't go home yet
but you aren't lost
this is our school
I'm not sure what we'll eat
we'll look for healthy roots and greens
searching for water though the pipes are broken
5
There's a young cat sticking
her head through window bars
she's hungry like us
but can feed on mice
her bronze erupting fur
speaks of a life already wild
her golden eyes
don't give quarter She'll teach us Let's call her
Sister
when we get milk we'll give her some
6
I've told you, let's try to sleep in this funny camp
All night pitiless pilotless things go shrieking
above us to somewhere
Don't let your faces turn to stone
Don't stop asking me why
Let's pay attention to our cat she needs us
Maybe tomorrow the bakers can fix their ovens
7
"We sang them to naps told stories made
shadow-animals with our hands
wiped human debris off boots and coats
sat learning by heart the names
some were too young to write
some had forgotten how"
2001
THIS EVENING LET'S
not talk
about my country How
I'm from an optimistic culture
that speaks louder than my passport
Don't double-agent-contra my
invincible innocence I've
got my own
suspicions Let's
order retsina
cracked olives and bread
I've got questions of my own but
let's give a little
let's let a little be
If friendship is not a tragedy
if it's a mercy
we can be merciful
if it's just escape
we're neither of us running
why otherwise be here
Too many reasons not
to waste a rainy evening
in a backroom of bouzouki
and kitchen Greek
I've got questions of my own but
let's let it be a little
There's a beat in my head
song of my country
called Happiness, U.S.A.
Drowns out bouzouki
drowns out world and fusion
with its Get—get—get
into your happiness before
happiness pulls away
hangs a left along the piney shore
weaves a hand at you—"one I adore"—
Don't be proud, run hard for that
enchantment boat
tear up the shore if you must but
get into your happiness because
before
and otherwise
it's going to pull away
So tell me later
what I know already
and what I don't get
yet save for another day
Tell me this time
what you are going through
travelling the Metropolitan
Express
break out of that style
give me your smile
awhile
2001
VARIATIONS ON LINES FROM A CANADIAN POET
I needed a genre for the times I go phantom. I needed a genre to rampage Liberty, haunt the foul freedom of silence. I needed a genre to pry loose Liberty from an impacted marriage with the soil. I needed a genre to gloss my ancestress' complicity….
—Lisa Robertson, XEclogue (1993)
I need a gloss for the silence implicit in my legacy
for phantom Liberty standing bridal at my harbor
I need a gauze to slow the hemorrhaging of my history
I need an ancestor complicit in my undercover prying
I need soil that whirls and spirals upward somewhere else
I need dustbowl, sand dune, dustdevils for roots
I need the border-crossing eye of a tornado
I need an ancestor fleeing into Canada
to rampage freedom there or keep on fleeing
to keep on fleeing or invent a genre
to distemper ideology
2002
DELIVERED CLEAN
You've got to separate what they signify from what
they are distinguish
their claimed intentions from the stuff coming
out from their hands and heads The professor of cultural dynamics
taught us this They're disasters in absentia
really when supposedly working
Look at the record:
lost their minds wrote bad checks and smoked in bed
and if they were men were bad with women and if they were women
picked men like that or would go with women
and talked too much and burnt the toast and abused all
known substances Anyone who says
they were generous to a fault putting change
in whoever's cup if they had it on them always room for the friend
with no place to sleep refused to make what they made
in the image of the going thing
cooked up stews that could keep you alive with
gizzards and onions and splashes of raw
red wine were
loyal where they loved and wouldn't name names
should remember said the professor of cultural
dynamics what
messes they made
The building will be delivered vacant
of street actors so-called artists in residence
fast-order cooks on minimum wage
who dreamed up a life where space was cheap
muralists doubling as rabble-rousers
cross-dressing pavement poets
delivered clean
of those who harbor feral cats illegals illicit ideas
selling their blood to buy old vinyls
living at night and sleeping by day
with huge green plants in their windows
and huge eyes painted on their doors.
[for Jack Foley]
2002
THE EYE
A balcony, violet shade on stucco fruit in a plastic bowl on the iron
raggedy legged table, grapes and sliced melon, saucers, a knife, wine
in a couple of thick short tumblers cream cheese once came in: our snack
in the eye of the war There are places where fruit is implausible, even
rest is implausible, places where wine if any should be poured into wounds
but we're not yet there or it's not here yet it's the war
not us, that moves, pauses and hurtles forward into the neck
and groin of the city, the soft indefensible places but not here yet
Behind the balcony an apartment, papers, pillows, green vines still watered
there are waterless places but not here yet, there's a bureau topped
with marble
and combs and brushes on it, little tubes for lips and eyebrows, a dish
of coins and keys
there's a bed a desk a stove a cane rocker a bookcase civilization
cage with a skittery bird, there are birdless places but not
here yet, this bird must creak and flutter in the name of all
uprooted orchards, limbless groves
this bird standing for wings and song that here can't fly
Our bed quilted wine poured future uncertain you'd think
people like us would have it scanned and planned tickets to somewhere
would be in the drawer with all our education you'd think we'd
have taken measures
soon as ash started turning up on the edges of everything ash
in the leaves of books ash on the leaves of trees and in the veins of
the passive
innocent life we were leading calling it hope
you'd think that and we thought this it's the war not us that's moving
like shade on a balcony
2002
THERE IS NO ONE STORY AND ONE STORY ONLY
The engineer's story of hauling coal
to Davenport for the cement factory, sitting on the bluffs
between runs looking for whales, hauling concrete
back to Gilroy, he and his wife renewing vows
in the glass chapel in Arkansas after 25 years
The flight attendant's story murmured
to the flight steward in the dark galley
of her fifth-month loss of nerve
about carrying the baby she'd seen on the screen
The story of the forensic medical team's
small plane landing on an Alaska icefield
of the body in the bag they had to drag
over the ice like the whole life of that body
The story of the man driving
600 miles to be with a friend in another country seeming
easy when leaving but afterward
writing in a letter difficult truths
Of the friend watching him leave remembering
the story of her body
with his once and the stories of their children
made with other people and how his mind went on
pressing hers like a body
There is the story of the mind's
temperature neither cold nor celibate
Ardent The story of
not one thing only.
2002
II
USONIAN JOURNALS 2000
USONIAN JOURNALS 2000
[Usonian: the term used by Frank Lloyd Wright for his prairie-inspired architecture. Here, of the United States of North America.]
Citizen/Alien/Night/Mare
A country I was born and lived in undergoes rapid and flagrant change. I return here as a stranger. In fact I've lived here all along. At a certain point I realized I was no longer connected along any continuous strand to the nature of the change. I can't find my passport. Nobody asks me to show it.
Day/Job/Mare
…to lunch with K., USonian but recently from a British university. Described as "our Marxist." Dark and pretty, already she's got half the department classified: She's crazy…He's carrying the chip of race on his shoulder…she's here because he is, isn't she?…He's not likely to make it through… Ask her about current Brit. labor scene; she talks about the influence of the industrial revolution on Victorian prose. My aim: get clear of this, find another day job.
As we left the dark publike restaurant the street—ordinary enough couple of blocks between a parking lot and an office complex—broke into spitting, popping sounds and sudden running. I held back against the wall, she beside me. Something happened then everything. A man's voice screamed, then whined: a police siren starting up seemed miles away but then right there. I didn't see any blood. We ran in different directions, she toward, I away from, the police.
Document Window
Could I just show what's happening. Not that shooting, civil disturbance, whatever it was. I'd like you to see how differently we're all moving, how the time allowed to let things become known grows shorter and shorter, how quickly things and people get replaced. How interchangeable it all could get to seem. Could get to seem… the kind of phrase we use now, avoiding the verb to be. There's a sense in which, we say, dismissing other senses.
Rimbaud called for the rational derangement of all the senses in the name of poetry. Marx: capitalism deranges all the senses save the sense of property.
Keeping my back against unimportant walls I moved out of range of the confusion, away from the protection of the police. Having seen nothing I could swear to I felt at peace with my default. I would, at least, not be engaged in some mess not my own.
This is what I mean though: how differently we move now, rapidly deciding what is and isn't ours. Indifferently.
Voices
Wreathed around the entrance to a shopping mall, a student dining hall, don't pause for a word, or to articulate an idea. What hangs a moment in the air is already dead: That's history.
The moment—Edwin Denby describes it—when a dancer, leaping, stands still in the air. Pause in conversation when time would stop, an idea hang suspended, then get taken up and carried on. (Then that other great style of conversation: everyone at once, each possessed with an idea.) This newer conversation: I am here and talking, talking, here and talking…Television the first great lesson: against silence. "I thought she'd never call and I went aaah! to my friend and she went give it a week, she'll call you all right and you did"—"And you went waowh! and I went, right, I went O.K., it's only I was clueless? so now can we grab something nearby, cause I'm due on in forty-five?"
A neighbor painting his garage yelling in cell phone from the driveway: voice that penetrates kitchen-window glass. "Fucking worst day of my fucking life, fucking wife left me for another man, both on coke and, you know? I don't CARE! thought it was only maryjane she was, do you KNOW the prison term for coke? Fucking dealer, leaves me for him because she's HOOKED and I'm supposed to CARE? Do they know what they'll GET?"
Private urgencies made public, not collective, speaker within a bubble. In the new restaurant: "Marty? Thought I'd never get through to you. We need to move quickly with SZ-02, there are hounds on the trail. Barney won't block you at all. Just give him what we talked about."
USonian speech. Men of the upwardly mobilizing class needing to sound boyish, an asset in all the newness of the new: upstart, startup, adventurist, pirate lad's nasal bravado in the male vocal cords. Voices of girls and women screeking to an excitable edge of brightness. In an excessively powerful country, grown women sound like girls without authority or experience. Male, female voices alike pitched fastforward commercial, one timbre, tempo, intonation.
Mirrors
Possible tones of the human voice, their own possible physical beauty—no recognition. The fish-eye lens bobbles faces back. Bodies heavy with sad or enraged feminine or macho brooding mimic stand-up comics, celebrities; grimace, gesticulate. The nakedest generation of young USonians with little intuition of the human history of nakedness, luminous inventions of skin and musculature. Their surfaces needlepointed with conventionally outrageous emblems, what mirror to render justly their original beauty back to them?
You touched me in places so deep I wanted to ignore you.
Artworks (I)
Painting on a gallery wall: people dwelling on opposite sides of a pane of glass. None of their eyes exchanging looks. Yellow flashes off the rug in the room and from the orchard beyond. House of people whose eyes do not meet.
White people doing and seeing no evil.
(Photograph of family reunion, eyes on the wide-lens camera, unmeeting.) "In fact I've lived here all along."
That was them not us. We were at the time in the time of our displacement, being torn from a false integrity. We stared at the pictures in the gallery knowing they were not us, we were being driven further for something else and who knew how far and for how long and what we were to do.
Stranger
Isolation begins to form, moves in like fog on a clear afternoon. Arrives with the mail, leaves its messages on the phone machine. If you hadn't undergone this so often it could take you by surprise, but its rime-white structure is the simple blueprint of your displacement. You: who pride yourself on not giving in, keep discovering in dreams new rooms in an old house, drawing new plans: living with strangers, enough for all, wild tomato plants along the road, redness for hunger and thirst. (Unrest, too, in the house of dreams: the underworld lashing back.)
But this fog blanks echoes, blots reciprocal sounds. The padded cell of a moribund democracy, or just your individual case?
Artworks (II)
Early summer lunch with friends, talk rises: poetry, urban design and planning, film. Strands of interest and affection binding us differently around the table. If an uneasy political theme rears up—the meaning of a show of lynching photographs in New York, after Mapplethorpe's photos, of sociopathic evil inside the California prison industry—talk fades. Not a pause but: a suppression. No one is monitoring this conversation but us. We know the air is bad in here, maybe want not to push that knowledge, ask what is to be done? How to breathe? What will suffice? Draft new structures or simply be aware? If art is our only resistance, what does that make us? If we're collaborators, what's our offering to corruption—an aesthetic, anaesthetic, dye of silence, withdrawal, intellectual disgust?
This fade-out/suspension of conversation: a syndrome of the past decades? our companionate immune systems under siege, viral spread of social impotence producing social silence?
Imagine written language that walks away from human conversation. A written literature, back turned to oral traditions, estranged from music and body. So what might reanimate, rearticulate, becomes less and less available.
Incline
Dreamroad rising steeply uphill; David is driving. I see it turning into a perpendicular structure salvaged from a long metal billboard: we will have to traverse this at a ninety-degree angle, then at the top go over and down the other side. There are no exits. Around is the Mojave Desert: open space. D.'s car begins to lose momentum as the incline increases; he tries shifting into a lower gear and gunning the engine. There is no way off this incline now, we're forced into a situation we hadn't reckoned on—a road now become something that is no road, something designated as "commercial space." I suggest rolling (ourselves in) the car down the steep dusty shoulder into the desert below, and out. For both of us, the desert isn't vacancy or fear, it's life, a million forms of witness. The fake road, its cruel deception, is what we have to abandon.
Mission Statement
The Organization for the Abolition of Cruelty has an air deployment with bases on every continent and on obscurer tracts of land. Airstrips and hangars have been constructed to accommodate large and small aircraft for reconnoiter and rescue missions whether on polar ice or in desert or rainforest conditions. Many types of craft are of course deployed to urban clusters. The mission of the Organization is not to the First, Third, or any other World. It is directed toward the investigation and abrogation of cruelty in every direction, including present and future extraterrestrial locations.
It is obvious that the destruction of despair is still our most urgent task. In this regard, we employ paramilitary methods with great care and watchfulness.
The personnel dedicated to this new program are responsible to the mission, not to any national body. We are apprised of all new technologies as soon as available. Hence we have a unique fusion of policy and technology, unique in that its purpose is the abolition of cruelty.
Ours is the first project of its kind to be fully empowered through the new paranational charters. In principle, it is now recognized that both agents and objects of cruelty must be rescued and transformed, and that they sometimes merge into each other.
In response to your inquiry: this is a complex operation. We have a wide range of specializations and concerns. Some are especially calibrated toward language
because of its known and unknown powers
to bind and to dissociate
because of its capacity
to ostracize the speechless
because of its capacity
to nourish self-deception
because of its capacity
for rebirth and subversion
because of the history
of torture
against human speech
2000–2002
III
TERRITORY SHARED
ADDRESS
Orientation of the word toward its addressee has an extremely high significance. In point of fact, word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant…. Each and every word expresses the "one" in relation to the "other."…A word is territory shared by both addressor and addressee, by the speaker and his interlocutor.
—V. N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language
If all we would speak is ideology
believable walking past pent-up Christmas trees
in a California parking lot day before Thanksgiving hot sun
on faint
scent of spruce in the supermarket
mixed metaphors of food
faces expectant, baffled, bitter, distracted
wandering aisles or like me and the man ahead of me buying
only milk
my car door grabbed open by a woman
thinking it her husband's car honking for her somewhere else
—and I think it true indeed I know
I who came only for milk am speaking it: though
would stand somewhere beyond
this civic nausea
: desiring not to stand apart
like Jeffers giving up on his kind loving only unhuman creatures
because they transcend ideology in eternity as he thought
but he wasn't writing to them
nor today's gull perched on the traffic light
Nor can this be about remorse
staring over its shopping cart
feeling its vague ideological thoughts
nor about lines of credit
blanketing shame and fear
nor being conscripted for violence
from without beckoning at rage within
I know what it cannot be
But who at the checkout this one day
do I address who is addressing me
what's the approach whose the manners
whose dignity whose truth
when the change purse is tipped into the palm
for an exact amount without which
2002
TRANSPARENCIES
That the meek word like the righteous word can bully
that an Israeli soldier interviewed years
after the first Intifada could mourn on camera
what under orders he did, saw done, did not refuse
that another leaving Beit Jala could scrawl
on a wall: We are truely sorry for the mess we made
is merely routine word that would cancel deed
That human equals innocent and guilty
That we grasp for innocence whether or no
is elementary That words can translate into broken bones
That the power to hurl words is a weapon
That the body can be a weapon
any child on playground knows That asked your favorite word
in a game
you always named a thing, a quality, freedom or river
(never a pronoun never G-d or War)
is taken for granted That word and body
are all we have to lay on the line
That words are windowpanes in a ransacked hut, smeared
by time's dirty rains, we might argue
likewise that words are clear as glass till the sun strikes it blinding
But that in a dark windowpane you have seen your face
That when you wipe your glasses the text grows clearer
That the sound of crunching glass comes at the height of the
wedding
That I can look through glass
into my neighbor's house
but not my neighbor's life
That glass is sometimes broken to save lives
That a word can be crushed like a goblet underfoot
is only what it seems, part question, part answer: how
you live it
2002
LIVRESQUE
There hangs a space between the man
and his words
like the space around a few snowflakes
just languidly beginning
space
where an oil rig has dissolved in fog
man in self-arrest
between word and act
writing agape, agape
with a silver fountain pen
2002
COLLABORATIONS
I
Thought of this "our" nation:: thought of war
ghosts of war fugitive
in labyrinths of amnesia
veterans out-of-date textbooks in a library basement
evidence trundled off plutonium under tarps after dark
didn't realize it until I wrote it
August now apples have started
severing from the tree
over the deck by night their dim impact
thuds into dreams
by daylight bruised starting to stew in sun
saying "apple" to nose and tongue
to memory
Word following sense, the way it should be
and if you don't speak the word
do you lose your senses
And isn't this just one speck, one atom
on the glazed surface we call
America
from which I write
the war ghosts treading in their shredded
disguises above the clouds
and the price we pay here still opaque as the fog
these mornings
we always say will break open?
II
Try this on your tongue: "the poetry of the enemy"
If you read it will you succumb
Will the enemy's wren fly through your window
and circle your room
Will you smell the herbs hung to dry in the house
he has had to rebuild in words
Would it weaken your will to hear
riffs of the instruments he loves
rustling of rivers remembered
where faucets are dry
"The enemy's water" is there a phrase
for that in your language?
And you what do you write
now in your borrowed house tuned in
to the broadcasts of horror
under a sagging arbor, dimdumim
do you grope for poetry
to embrace all this
—not describe, embrace staggering
in its arms, Jacob-and-angel-wise?
III
Do you understand why I want your voice?
At the seder table it's said
you reclined and said nothing
now in the month of Elul is your throat so dry
your dreams so stony
you wake with their grit in your mouth?
There was a beautiful life here once
Our enemies poisoned it?
Make a list of what's lost but don't
call it a poem
that's for the scriptors of nostalgia
bent to their copying-desks
Make a list of what you love well
twist it insert it
into a bottle of old Roman glass
go to the edge of the sea
at Haifa where the refugee ships lurched in
and the ships of deportation wrenched away
IV
for Giora Leshem
Drove upcoast first day of another year no rain
oxalis gold lakes floating
on January green
Can winter tides off the Levant
churn up wilder spume?
Think Crusades, remember Acre
wind driving at fortress walls
everything returns in time except the
utterly disappeared
What thou lovest well can well be reft from thee
What does not change / is the will
to vanquish
the fascination with what's easiest
see it in any video arcade
is this what the wind is driving at?
Where are you Giora? whose hands
lay across mine a moment
Can you still believe that afternoon
talking you smoking light and shade
on the deck, here in California
our laughter, your questions of translation
your daughter's flute?
2002–2003
RITUAL ACTS
i
We are asking for books
No, not—but a list of books
to be given to young people
Well, to young poets
to guide them in their work
He gestures impatiently
They won't read he says
My time is precious
If they want to they'll find
whatever they need
I'm going for a walk after lunch
After that I lie down
Then and only then do I read the papers
Mornings are for work
the proofs of the second volume
—my trilogy, and he nods
And we too nod recognition
ii
The buses—packed
since the subways are forbidden
and the highways forsaken
so people bring everything on—
what they can't do without—
Air conditioners, sculpture
Double baskets of babies
Fruit platters, crematory urns
Sacks of laundry, of books
Inflated hearts, bass fiddles
Bridal gowns in plastic bags
Pet iguanas, oxygen tanks
The tablets of Moses
iii
After all—to have loved, wasn't that the object?
Love is the only thing in life
but then you can love too much
or the wrong way, you lose
yourself or you lose
the person
or you strangle each other
Maybe the object of love is
to have loved
greatly
at one time or another
Like a cinema trailer
watched long ago
iv
You need to turn yourself around
face in another direction
She wrapped herself in a flag
soaked it in gasoline and lit a match
This is for the murdered babies
they say she said
Others heard
for the honor of my country
Others remember
the smell and how she screamed
Others say, This was just theater
v
This will not be a love scene
but an act between two humans
Now please let us see you
tenderly scoop his balls
into your hand
You will hold them
under your face
There will be tears on your face
That will be all
the director said
We will not see his face
He wants to do the scene
but not to show
his face
vi
A goat devouring a flowering plant
A child squeezing through a fence to school
A woman slicing an onion
A bare foot sticking out
A wash line tied to a torn-up tree
A dog's leg lifted at a standpipe
An old man kneeling to drink there
A hand on the remote
We would like to show but to not be obvious
except to the oblivious
We want to show ordinary life
We are dying to show it
2003
POINT IN TIME
If she's writing a letter on a sheet of mica
to be left on the shelf of the cave
with the century's other letters each
stained with its own DNA expressed
in love's naked dark or the dawn
of a day of stone:
it's a fact like a town crosshaired on a map
But we are not keeping archives here
where all can be blown away
nor raking the graves in Père-Lachaise
nor is she beholden or dutiful
as her pen pushes its final stroke
into the mineral page
molecule speaking to molecule
for just this moment
This is the point in time when
she must re-condense her purpose
like ink, like rain, like winter light
like foolishness and hatred
like the blood her hand first knew
as a wet patch on the staircase wall
she was feeling her way down in the dark.
2003
IV
ALTERNATING CURRENT
ALTERNATING CURRENT
Sometimes I'm back in that city
in its/ not my/ autumn
crossing a white bridge
over a dun-green river
eating shellfish with young poets
under the wrought-iron roof of the great market
drinking with the dead poet's friend
to music struck
from odd small instruments
walking arm in arm with the cinematographer
through the whitelight gardens of Villa Grimaldi
earth and air stretched
to splitting still
his question:
have you ever been in a place like this?
No bad dreams. Night, the bed, the faint clockface.
No bad dreams. Her arm or leg or hair.
No bad dreams. A wheelchair unit screaming
off the block. No bad dreams. Pouches of blood: red cells,
plasma. Not here. No, none. Not yet.
Take one, take two
—camera out of focus delirium swims
across the lens Don't get me wrong I'm not
critiquing your direction
but I was there saw what you didn't
take the care
you didn't first of yourself then
of the child Don't get me wrong I'm on
your side but standing off
where it rains not on the set where it's
not raining yet
take three
What's suffered in laughter in aroused afternoons
in nightly yearlong back-to-back
wandering each others' nerves and pulses
O changing love that doesn't change
A deluxe blending machine
A chair with truth's coat of arms
A murderous code of manners
A silver cocktail reflecting a tiny severed hand
A small bird stuffed with print and roasted
A row of Lucite chessmen filled with shaving lotion
A bloodred valentine to power
A watered-silk innocence
A microwaved foie gras
A dry-ice carrier for conscience donations
A used set of satin sheets folded to go
A box at the opera of suffering
A fellowship at the villa, all expenses
A Caterpillar's tracks gashing the environment
A bad day for students of the environment
A breakdown of the blending machine
A rush to put it in order
A song in the chapel a speech a press release
As finally by wind or grass
drive-ins
where romance always was
an after-dark phenomenon
lie crazed and still
great panoramas lost to air
this time this site of power shall pass
and we remain or not but not remain
as now we think we are
for J.J.
When we are shaken out
when we are shaken out to the last vestige
when history is done with us
when our late grains glitter
salt swept into shadow
indignant and importunate strife-fractured crystals
will it matter if our tenderness (our solidarity)
abides in residue
long as there's tenderness and solidarity
Could the tempos and attunements of my voice
in a poem or yours or yours and mine
in telephonic high hilarity
cresting above some stupefied inanity
be more than personal
(and—as you once said—what's wrong with that?)
2002–2003
V
If some long unborn friend
looks at photos in pity,
we say, sure we were happy,
but it was not in the wind.
MEMORIZE THIS
i
Love for twenty-six years, you can't stop
A withered petunia's crisp the bud sticky both are dark
The flower engulfed in its own purple So common, nothing
like it
The old woodstove gone to the dump
Sun plunges through the new skylight
This morning's clouds piled like autumn in Massachusetts
This afternoon's far-flung like the Mojave
Night melts one body into another
One drives fast the other maps a route
Thought new it becomes familiar
From thirteen years back maybe
One oils the hinges one edges the knives
One loses an earring the other finds it
One says I'd rather make love
Than go to the Greek Festival
The other, I agree.
ii
Take a strand of your hair
on my fingers let it fall
across the pillow lift to my nostrils
inhale your body entire
Sleeping with you after
weeks apart how normal
yet after midnight
to turn and slide my arm
along your thigh
drawn up in sleep
what delicate amaze
2002–2003
THE PAINTER'S HOUSE
Nineteen-thirties midwestern
—the painter long gone to the sea—
plutonic sycamore by the shed
a mailbox open mouthed
in garden loam a chip
of veiny china turned
up there where he might have stood
eyeing the dim lip of grass
beyond, the spring stars sharpening
above
Well since there's still light walk around
stand on the porch
cup hands around eyes peering in
Is this the kitchen where she worked and thought
Is that the loft where their bodies fell
into each other The nail where the mirror
hung the shelf where her college books
eyed her aslant
Those stairs would her bare feet have felt?
In the mute shed no trace
of masterworks occult
fury of pigment no
downslash of provocation
no whirled hands at the doorjamb
no lightning streak no stab in the dark
no sex no face
2003
AFTER APOLLINAIRE & BRASSENS
When the bridge of lovers bends
over the oilblack river
and we see our own endings
through eyes aching and blearing
when the assault begins
and we're thrown apart still longing
when the Bridge of Arts trembles
under the streaked sky
when words of the poets tumble
into the shuddering stream
where who knew what joy
would leap after what pain
what flows under the Seine
Mississippi Jordan Tigris
Elbe Amazon Indus Nile
and all the tributaries
who knows where song goes
now and from whom
toward what longings
2003
SLASHES
Years pass and two who once
don't know each other at all
dark strokes gouge a white wall as lives
and customs slashed by dates:
October '17 / May '68
/ September '73
Slash across lives memory pursues its errands
a lent linen shirt pulled unabashedly over her naked shoulders
cardamom seed bitten in her teeth
watching him chop onions
words in the air segregation/partition/apartheid
vodka/cigarette smoke a time
vertigo on subway stairs
Years pass she pressing the time into a box
not to be opened a box
quelling pleasure and pain
You could describe something like this
in gossip write a novel get it wrong
In wolf-tree, see the former field
The river's muscle: greater than its length
the lake's light-blistered blue: scorning
circumference
A map inscribes relation
only when
underground aquifers are fathomed in
water table rising or falling
beneath apparently
imperturbable earth
music from a basement session overheard
2002
TRACE ELEMENTS
Back to the shallow pond sharp rotting scatter
leaf-skinned edge there where the ring
couldn't be sunk far out enough
(far enough from shore)
back out the rock-toothed logging road
to the dark brook where it's dropped mudsucked gold
(sucked under stones)
that's another marriage lucid and decisive
to say at last: I did, I do, I will
(I did not, I will not)
Snow-whirled streetlamps under a window
(a bedroom and a window)
icy inch of the raised sash blizzard clearing to calm
outlined furniture: figured mirror: bedded bodies:
warm blood: eyes in the dark:
no contradiction:
She was there
and they were there: her only now seeing it (only now)
Bow season: then gun season
Apricot leaves bloodsprinkled: soaked: case closed
Memory: echo in time
All's widescreen now lurid inchoate century
Vast disappearing acts the greatest show on earth
but here are small clear refractions
from an unclear season
blood on a leaf
gold trace element in water
light from the eye behind the eye
2003
BRACT
Stories of three islands
you've told me, over years
over meals, after quarrels,
light changing the spectrum of your hair
your green eyes, lying on our backs
naked or clothed, driving
through wind, eighteen-wheeler trucks
of produce crates ahead and behind
you saying, I couldn't live long
far from the ocean
Spring of new and continuing
war, harpsichord crashing
under Verlet's fingers
I tell you I could not live long
far from your anger
lunar reefed and tidal
bloodred bract from spiked stem
tossing on the ocean
2003
VI
DISLOCATIONS: SEVEN SCENARIOS
DISLOCATIONS: SEVEN SCENARIOS
1
Still learning the word
"home" or what it could mean
say, to relinquish
a backdrop of Japanese maples turning
color of rusted wheelbarrow bottom
where the dahlia tubers were thrown
You must go live in the city now
over the subway though not on
its grating
must endure the foreign music
of the block party
finger in useless anger
the dangling cords of the window blind
2
In a vast dystopic space the small things
multiply
when all the pills run out the pain
grows more general
flies find the many eyes
quarrels thicken then
weaken
tiny mandibles of rumor open and close
blame has a name that will not be spoken
you grasp or share a clot of food
according to your nature
or your strength
love's ferocity snarls
from under the drenched blanket's hood
3
City and world: this infection drinks like a drinker
whatever it can
casual salutations first
little rivulets of thought
then wanting stronger stuff
sucks at the marrow of selves
the nurse's long knowledge of wounds
the rabbi's scroll of ethics
the young worker's defiance
only the solipsist seems intact
in her prewar building
4
For recalcitrancy of attitude
the surgeon is transferred
to the V.A. hospital where poverty
is the administrator
of necessity and her
orders don't necessarily
get obeyed
because
the government
is paying
and the
used-to-be
warriors
are patients
5
Faces in the mesh: defiance or disdain
remember Paul Nizan?
You thought you were innocent if you said
"I love this woman and I want to live
in accordance with my love"
but you were beginning the revolution
maybe so, maybe not
look at her now
pale lips papery flesh
at your creased belly wrinkled sac
look at the scars
reality's autographs
along your ribs across her haunches
look at the collarbone's reverberant line
how in a body can defiance
still embrace its likeness
6
Not to get up and go back to the drafting table
where failure crouches accusing
like the math test you bluffed and flunked
so early on
not to drag into the window's
cruel and truthful light your blunder
not to start over
but to turn your back, saying
all anyway is compromise
impotence and collusion
from here on I will be no part of it
is one way could you afford it
7
Tonight someone will sleep in a stripped apartment
the last domestic traces, cup and towel
awaiting final disposal
—has ironed his shirt for travel
left an envelope for the cleaning woman
on the counter under the iron
internationalist turning toward home
three continents to cross documents declarations
searches queues
and home no simple matter
of hearth or harbor
bleeding from internal wounds
he diagnosed physician
without frontiers
2002
VII
FIVE O'CLOCK, JANUARY 2003
Tonight as cargoes of my young
fellow countrymen and women are being hauled
into positions aimed at death, positions
they who did not will it suddenly
have to assume
I am thinking of Ed Azevedo
half-awake in recovery
if he has his arm whole
and how much pain he must bear
under the drugs
On cliffs above a beach
luxuriant in low tide after storms
littered with driftwood hurled and piled and
humanly arranged in fantastic
installations and beyond
silk-blue and onion-silver-skinned
Jeffers' "most glorious creature on earth"
we passed, greeting, I saw his arm
bandaged to the elbow
asked and he told me: It was just
a small cut, nothing, on the hand he'd
washed in peroxide thinking
that was it until the pain began
traveling up his arm
and then the antibiotics the splint the
numbing drugs the sick sensation
and this evening at five o'clock the emergency
surgery and last summer
the train from Czechoslovakia to Spain
with his girl, cheap wine, bread and cheese
room with a balcony, ocean like this
nobody asking for pay in advance
kindness of foreigners
in that country, sick sensation now
needing to sit in his brother's truck again
even the accident on the motorcycle
was nothing like this
I'll be thinking of you at five
this evening I said
afterward you'll feel better, your body
will be clean of this poison
I didn't say Your war is here
but could you have believed
that from a small thing infection
would crawl through the blood
and the enormous ruffled shine
of an ocean wouldn't tell you.
2003
WAIT
In paradise every
the desert wind is rising
third thought
in hell there are no thoughts
is of earth
sand screams against your government
issued tent hell's noise
in your nostrils crawl
into your ear-shell
wrap yourself in no-thought
wait no place for the little lyric
wedding-ring glint the reason why
on earth
they never told you
2003
DON'T TAKE ME
too seriously please
take the December goodness
of my neighbors' light-strung eaves
take the struggle helping with the tree
for the children's sake
don't take me seriously
on questionnaires about faith and fault
and country Don't
take me for a loner don't take me for a foreigner don't
take me in the public
library checking definitions
of freedom in the dictionary or
tracing satellites after curfew
or in my Goodwill truck delivering a repaired TV
to the house of the foil'd revolutionary
2002
TO HAVE WRITTEN THE TRUTH
To have spent hours stalking the whine of an insect
have smashed its body in blood on a door
then lain sleepless with rage
to have played in the ship's orchestra crossing
the triangle route
dissonant arpeggios under cocktail clatter
to have written the truth in a lightning flash
then crushed those words in your hand
balled-up and smoking
when self-absolution
easygoing pal of youth
leans in the doorframe
Kid, you always
took yourself so hard!
2003
SCREEN DOOR
Metallic slam on a moonless night
A short visit and so we departed.
A short year with many long
days
A long phone call with many pauses.
It was gesture's code
we were used to using, we were
awkward without it.
Over the phone: knocking heard
at a door in another country.
Here it's tonight: there tomorrow.
A vast world we used to think small.
That we knew everyone who mattered.
Firefly flicker. Metallic slam. A moonless night. Too dark
for gesture.
But it was gesture's code we were used to.
Might need again. Urgent
hold-off or beckon.
Fierce supplication. One finger pointing: "Thither."
Palms flung upward: "What now?"
Hand slicing the air or across the throat.
A long wave to the departing.
2003
VIII
TENDRIL
TENDRIL
1
Why does the outstretched finger of home
probe the dark hotel room like a flashlight beam
on the traveller, half-packed, sitting on the bed
face in hands, wishing her bag emptied again at home
Why does the young security guard
pray to keep standing watch forever, never to fly
Why does he wish he were boarding
as the passengers file past him into the plane
What are they carrying in their bundles
what vanities, superstitions, little talismans
What have the authorities intercepted
who will get to keep it
2
Half-asleep in the dimmed cabin
she configures a gecko
aslant the overhead bin tendrils of vine
curling up through the cabin floor
buried here in night as in a valley
remote from rescue
Unfound, confounded, vain, superstitious, whatever we were
before
now we are still, outstretched, curled, however we were
Unwatched the gecko, the inching of green
through the cracks in the fused imperious shell
3
Dreaming a womb's languor valleyed in death
among fellow strangers
she has merely slept through the night
a nose nearby rasps, everyone in fact is breathing
the gecko has dashed into some crevice
of her brain, the tendrils retract
orange juice is passed on trays
declarations filled out in the sudden dawn
4
She can't go on dreaming of mass death
this was not to have been her métier
she says to the mirror in the toilet
a bad light any way you judge yourself
and she's judge, prosecutor, witness, perpetrator
of her time
's conspiracies of the ignorant
with the ruthless She's the one she's looking at
5
This confessional reeks of sweet antiseptic
and besides she's not confessing
her mind balks craving wild onions
nostril-chill of eucalyptus
that seventh sense of what's missing
against what's supplied
She walks at thirty thousand feet into the cabin
sunrise crashing through the windows
Cut the harping she tells herself
You're human, porous like all the rest
6
She was to have sat in a vaulted
library heavy scrolls wheeled to a desk
for sieving, sifting, translating
all morning then a quick lunch thick coffee
then light descending slowly
on earthen-colored texts
but that's a dream of dust
frail are thy tents humanity
facing thy monologues of force
She must have fallen asleep reading
7
She must have fallen asleep reading
The woman who mopped the tiles
is deliquescent a scarlet gel
her ligaments and lungs
her wrought brain her belly's pulse
disrupt among others mangled there
the chief librarian the beggar
the man with the list of questions
the scrolls never to be translated
and the man who wheeled the scrolls
8
She had wanted to find meaning in the past but the future drove
a vagrant tank a rogue bulldozer
rearranging the past in a blip
coherence smashed into vestige
not for her even the thought
of her children's children picking up
one shard of tile then another laying
blue against green seeing words
in three scripts flowing through vines and flowers
guessing at what it was
the levantine debris
Not for her but still for someone?
2003
NOTES ON THE POEMS
Tell Me
remembered if outlived / as freezing: Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), no. 341.
harrowed in defeats of language: Michael Heller, "Sag Harbor, Whitman, As If An Ode," in Wordflow: New and Selected Poems (Jersey City, N.J.: Talisman House, 1997), p. 129.
in history to my barest marrow: Black Salt: Poems by Édouard Glissant, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 33.
This evening let's
friendship is not a tragedy: See June Jordan, "Civil Wars" (1980), in Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 267.
Delivered Clean
"Delivered vacant" is a developer's phrase for a building for sale whose tenants have already been evicted. See Rebecca Solnit, Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism (New York: Verso, 2000), p. 158.
Transparencies
we are truely sorry… Clyde Haberman, "Palestinians Reclaim Their Town after Israelis Withdraw," New York Times, August 31, 2001, p. A6.
Collaborations
dimdumim: Hebrew for "dawn," "dusk," "twilight."
what thou lovest well… See Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos (London: Faber & Faber, 1959), p. 112: "what thou lovest well remains…cannot be reft from thee."
what does not change… See Charles Olson, "The Kingfishers," in his Selected Poems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 5: "What does not change / is the will to change."
the fascination with what's easiest… See W. B. Yeats, "The Fascination of What's Difficult," in his Collected Poems, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1950), p. 104.
Alternating Current
The Villa Grimaldi outside Santiago, formerly a military officers' club, was converted to a detention and torture facility during the Pinochet regime in Chile. It is now a memorial park honoring the victims of torture.
V
If some long unborn friend…: Muriel Rukeyser, "Tree of Days," in Muriel Rukeyser, Selected Poems, ed. Adrienne Rich (New York: Library of America, 2004), p. 69.
After Apollinaire & Brassens
Derived from Guillaume Apollinaire's poem "Le Pont Mirabeau" and Georges Brassens's song "Le Pont des Arts."
Slashes
October '17 / May '68 / September '73: October 1917 marked the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, a determinative event in twentieth-century history. May 1968 saw massive popular U.S. opposition to the war in Vietnam, linked with the movement for Black civil rights and with anticolonial struggles abroad; in France there were uprisings of workers and students. On September 11, 1973, in Chile, a military coup under General Augusto Pinochet backed by the CIA violently seized power from the elected socialist government of Salvador Allende.
In wolf-tree, see the former field: See Anne Whiston Spirn, The Language of Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 18–19: "A 'wolf' tree is a tree within a woods, its size and form, large trunk and horizontal branches, anomalous to the environs of slim-trunked trees with upright branches…a clue to the open field in which it once grew alone, branches reaching laterally to the light and up."
Dislocations: Seven Scenarios—5
You thought you were innocent… See Paul Nizan, Aden Arabie (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968), p. 131.
Five O'Clock, January 2003
most glorious creature on earth: See Robinson Jeffers, "Ninth Anniversary," in The Wild G-d of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers, ed. Albert Gelpi (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 52: "there the most glorious / Creature on earth shines in the nights or glitters in the suns, / Or feels of its stone in the blind fog."
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to the following publications in which some of these poems have appeared, sometimes in earlier versions:
American Poetry Review
Bloom: Queer Fiction, Art, Poetry and More
Boston Review
Brick (Toronto)
Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends
Connect: Art Politics Theory Practice
Hunger
Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture (www.logosjournal.com)
Long Shot
Massachusetts Review
Michigan Quarterly Review
Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine
Poets Against the War (Nation Books, Sam Hamill, editor)
Present Tense: Poets in the World
(Mark Pawlak and Ron Schreiber, editors; Hanging Loose Press)
The Progressive
Seattle Journal for Social Justice
Tri-Quarterly, a publication of Northwestern University
Water-Stone
XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics
ZYZZYVA
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