History and Language: Two Considerations

-- Published by 11 September 2001, the Response of Poetry (website) --

1. Racism, Violence Against Others, & the Dwarf Who Understood the Language of Action

I surveyed the country that had cost us so much trouble, anxiety, and blood, and that now caused me to be a prisoner of war. I reflected on the ingratitude of the whites when I saw their fine houses, rich harvests, and everything desirable around them; and recollected that all this land had been ours, for which I and my people had never received a dollar, and that the whites were not satisfied until they took our village and our graveyards from us and removed us across the Mississippi.

-- Black Hawk

After Black Hawk's death in 1838, his skeleton was kept on display as a curiosity in the office of the Iowa Territory's governor.

-- Dee Brown, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee

From the very beginning, racism was built into the US's nation-building process. In fact, the United States of America could never have become a nation if it had not pursued a race-based policy that eventually resulted in the extermination of the majority of the continent's indigenous population. July 4, 1776 was not only the day the colonies declared their independence from Britain, it was also the day that, in effect, they sentenced the American Indian to death. From the earliest colonists' first expropriation of Indian land through the confinement of the shrunken number of surviving Indians on impoverished reservations in the twentieth century, the history of the continent's take-over by Europeans has been a history of white arrogance, broken treaties, policies of humiliation, and the construction of a "democratic" nation whose foundation was built from the corpses of the Indians killed in order to steal the land without which we could not have built our towns and cities.

If the Declaration of Independence was a white power document that boded ill for the continent's native inhabitants, other of the nation's founding documents also provided ways to include racism in the structure of American life, so that every institution, custom, and political assumption would be informed by a racialized world view. When, thirteen years after the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution was made law, blacks were defined in Article I, Section 2 of that law as a fragment (three-fifths) of a human being. Wholeness, or the idea of the complete human being, was reserved for whites. The part that was "missing" from blacks was not specifically designated. Whatever that part supposedly was, however, its absence left blacks bereft, in the law's eyes, of the very humanness that characterized human beings. This reduction of blacks to human fragments was the flip side of the mythicization of the new nation's white inhabitants as the planet's vanguard of democracy and Christian values. Blacks' supposed inferiority was the standard whites used to prove their own superiority; white arrogance needed black misery in order to thrive. Consequently, law and custom were used to strip blacks of their dignity and to construct in their place a new, utilitarian black designed to suit white needs. By law, slaves were not allowed to marry, take legal action against whites, learn to read, refuse commands made by their masters, or in any way exercise the freedoms proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. Such laws' purpose was not merely to curtail the range of black behavior. The laws' purpose also was to "invent," through the humiliation and deprivation that accompanied the laws, a being who could be easily viewed not as a being, but as property. In this way the black stolen from another continent was transformed (in whites' eyes) into a mindless subhuman without the same sensitivities that "real" humans -- i.e., whites -- possessed. This subhuman's destiny was not only to serve white appetites, but also to magnify, through her/his own denigration and lack of freedom, the glory of whites. Because of the white view that blacks were less than whole, beating, raping, torturing, overworking and putting to death such creatures was not a moral issue for the society which enslaved them. Psychologically, black inferiority was the foundation upon which white supremacy was built. Socially and economically, the slave system was a machinery of moral codes, attitudes and laws engineered to deflate blacks into soulless collections of muscles and sex organs capable of performing endless physical labor and of producing offspring destined to perform future physical labor.

Such racial dehumanization has parallels in other historical episodes of mass suffering perpetuated by a supposedly superior race. When in Mein Kampf Hitler proclaimed "Today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord," he spoke with a zealousness reminiscent of the New World's white settlers' belief that it was their God-ordained mission to gain dominion over the new continent. What Nazi zealousness meant for the unwanted, particularly Jews, is well known. Primo Levi, a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust in Germany, wrote about his experience in a Nazi concentration camp. A Haftling or prisoner in Auschwitz, the number 174517 was tattooed on Levi's left arm. According to him, the camp was not only "a gigantic biological and social experiment" that included technology for streamlining mass executions and cremations, but it was also, through the use of forced labor and constant rituals of humiliation designed to destroy inmates' humanity, "a great machine to reduce us to beasts.". This industrial experiment in the destruction of the human will, of the transformation of human beings into inhumanly treated brutes, is the connection which links the Nazi concentration camp to the US slave plantation. Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief and Hitler's right-hand man, would have been at home as an 18th century colonial Christian minister breathing fire and brimstone from his Georgia pulpit as he praised the glorious activity of brutalizing blacks in the New World.

Fortunately, not all the New World's white inhabitants would have liked Rev. Goebbels' harangues.

Benjamin Lay, a white dwarf with a humpback, lived in a colonial village. One day in this village a respectable family's young son was kidnapped. Concern and panic swept through the town. Little did anyone know that Lay was the kidnapper. Finally, after approximately one day of mounting community anxiety, the dwarf returned the child to the distraught family. When he did so, he told the mother and father, "Now you know what a horrible thing it is to lose your child. Possibly this will give you some idea what it's like for African parents whose children are taken from them in order to be made into slaves."

Lay, an anti-slavery Quaker, had made his point. But did he have the right to distress the village's residents and the parents of the kidnapped child in order to make the point?

Primo Levi deals with a different, but related, issue. Levi says the highly orchestrated dehumanization and barbarity of the concentration camps was so beyond the scope of the normal, that normal language cannot give adequate expression to the camp experience, and therefore "a new, harsh language" must be created in order to express what is, in normal language, inexpressible.

Benjamin Lay can be viewed as a man who attempted to begin, through his action, the process of inventing "a new, harsh language" that would express the slave experience to those incapable of or unwilling to comprehend its horror.

Lay's was the language of action.

Slaves themselves experimented with a variety of survival tactics: passive resistance, low-key sabotage, periodic participation in violent revolts, and the creation of an African-American alternative culture. As the slave system developed, consciousness of oppression permeated every aspect of black life, providing even apparently simple lullabies (sung by black nannies to their masters' children) with an ideological character. In the following slave-era song, for instance, the "lambie" symbolizes the slave-mother's child, whom she is unable to care for because she is forced to tend her owner's child, to whom the song is being sung. The lullaby's bitterness is subtly reflected in the comparison between the two children, one a protected white child of privilege, the other a black outcaste, naked and vulnerable before the world's brutal forces.

                                                                              Hush-a-bye, don't you cry
                                                                              Go to sleep little baby,
                                                                              When you awake, you will have a cake
                                                                              And all the pretty little horses.

Way down yonder

                                                                              Down in the meadow
                                                                              There's a poor little lambie,
                                                                              The bees & the butterflies
                                                                              Pecking out his eyes,
                                                                              The poor little thing cried Mammy.

                                                                              Hush-a-bye, Hush-a-bye
                                                                            Go to sleep little baby.
                                                                              When you wake, you will have cake,
                                                                              & all the pretty little horses.

It is difficult to imagine language twisted more effectively into the expression of an anguish that seems inexpressible. What equivalent word-experiments, surrealisms, subject choices, etc. must be explored in order for today's US poets to develop a language worthy of describing the realities we face?

2. Sept. 11 and Aftermath: History and the Languages around Us

Following Sept. 11, 2001, the poet John Pawlik posted on the Melic Review's website discussion board a number of commentaries on the terrorist attacks and the bombing in Afghanistan.

According to one of Pawlik's posts, other nations envy the US because they consider us the beneficiaries of good fortune. Although a US citizen who immigrated here from Europe years ago, Pawlik wrote this particular post in the voice of a non-American. As he later said, he adopted this stance in order to more effectively make the point that citizens of other nations view the U.S. enviously. He wrote -

I don't think you Americans will ever be liked whatever you do. Much of the world sees your wealth and power not as a consequence of democracy, talent and/or effort but of extreme good fortune; you Americans were and are very lucky. As such, you are envied, resented, even hated, and there's pleasure in seeing you falter if not fail . . .

So long as your life is good, you will never be loved.

Pawlik's analysis of America-envy is, of course, in some ways correct. But it's also limited. His overemphasis on the rest of the world's envy of the US is like saying Sitting Bull disliked white settlers because he thought their shirts were nicer than his; maybe he did like their shirts, but he certainly had other, far more profound reasons for disliking the settlers. Similarly, people in different parts of the world possess more profound reasons than envy for distrusting or disliking the US.

Let's discuss some of those reasons. We can begin with the Middle East.

The Iranian hostage crisis of the late 1970s was a direct result of the US's 1953-54 participation in the overthrow of Iran's legitimate government and its replacement of that administration with the pro-western Shah of Iran's government, which became notorious throughout the world for its brutality. The reason for this CIA-sponsored coup was that the existing government threatened to nationalize British Petroleum's (and other Western companies') oil holdings.

Middle Eastern tensions also have been caused by the US's avid support for an Israel that, as most Muslims in the region know, was originally described by Herzel, the so-called father of modern Zionism, as an "outpost of civilization against eastern barbarism." Given this aspect of the Zionist vision, i.e., the view that Islam is a form of barbarism to be held in check by an Israeli-Western alliance, it isn't difficult to understand why the US, which is Israel's largest military supplier and foreign aid doner and its staunchest ally, suffers from chronically low popularity ratings in the region; this unpopularity isn't due to envy, but to the fact that the US has given Middle Eastern Islamic communities little reason to trust our good intentions. On the other hand, we have often shown them the Ugly American side of our face by displaying a decades-long hostility toward Palestinians' demand for a new homeland in repayment for the fact that it was their land that the Western colonial powers took in order to create Israel.

In addition to the oil/Islam/Palestinian questions, another regional sore point is the widespread belief that the US's interest in political hegemony in the area outweighs any humanitarian goals Washington claims to possess.

One frequently given example of the opportunism that lies behind the US's stated humanitarian goals is Washington's attitude toward biological weapons. The recent anthrax fright in the US has given Washington ample opportunity to proclaim its hatred of such weapons. However, what Washington has been less likely to discuss over the last two decades is the US's role in the development of biological weapons internationally. Take Iraq as an example. The building blocks for their biological warfare materials were supplied to Iraq in the 1980s by US (and other western) companies like Tanox Biosystems and ATCC (American Type Culture Collection) with government approval. Although the US government knew that the 1972 Geneva Conventions Regulations prohibited selling or experimenting with biological warfare materials, the government found it easy to circumvent these restrictions just as long as the selling and experimentation was performed by non-government businesses, even if those businesses received some of their direction from the government. Another factor that contributed to the government's willingness to look the other way with regard to Iraq's interest in chemical and biological weapons was that at the time Iraq intent was to use the weapons against Iran, which the US then viewed as a greater threat to US interests than Iraq. Consequently, the US pursued a policy of boosting Saddam Hussein's stature in the region so that he could counter Iran's regional power. Only after Hussein's usefulness to US regional policy declined did the Pentagon develop an anti-Iraq strategy, which was primarily designed to make sure that no power in the region -- in this case, Iraq -- was strong enough to jeopardize the US's commitment to retaining sufficient access to the area's oil supplies. But by the time the US became anti-Iraq, it was already too late: the chemical and biological weapons that would eventually play a role in the development of gulf war syndrome and the illness of US soldiers following the 1991 conflict were already in place.

As if such goings-on weren't bad enough, in the decade following the gulf war between 500,000 and one million Iraqis died as a result of the US trade embargo against Iraq. Although in the US many people rationalized this policy as somehow necessary, for the populations of Middle Eastern countries justifying the deaths wasn't so easy. From their perspective, the US, which repeatedly had stated during the Gulf War that it had nothing against the Iraqi people but only against Saddam Hussein, was in fact killing Iraqi civilians with trade sanctions in the hope that the infliction of such suffering would eventually spur Iraqis into rising up against Saddam Hussein. It hasn't worked.

The Middle East is only one region. Throughout the world, there are other non-envy-related reasons that make people, sometimes whole populations, suspicious of US power. Millions of Latin Americans dislike the US because of its history of supporting murderous dictatorships in countries like Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and the Caribbean. In India millions of poor peasants resent the agribusiness-fueled Americanization of subcontinent agriculture which has resulted in millions of small landholders losing their fields as the giant-farm mode of agriculture is pushed aggressively by US business interests. In the Pacific, US collusion, from 1975 on, with Indonesia's military presence in East Timor helped provide the foundation for the death of between one-quarter and one-third of the East Timorese population during the last quarter of the 20th century. The US's initial motives for supporting Indonesia included desire for free military use of waterways near East Timor, an interest in controlling possible offshore oil findings, and Washington's commitment to build a Cold War alliance with Indonesia's anti-communist government. Even long after the Cold War, during the 1999 Indonesia-orchestrated slaughter of East Timorese following the population's pro-independence vote, the US honored its relationship with Indonesia and only later, when international outrage concerning the mass murders continued to grow, did DC cut off relations with the Indonesian military. But this was a mostly symbolic gesture, since the US (a) refused to declare sanctions against Indonesia and (b) remained aloof from requests from the Vatican, Australia, New Zealand and other nations to intervene in order to save the East Timorese from further slaughter.

Whatever position one takes on the issues just mentioned, the facts render somewhat foolish Pawlik's claim that the main reason for anti-Americanism is that world citizens view Americans as "very lucky" and that because of this view we are "envied, resented, even hated." The rest of the world isn't quite so empty-headed as such an evaluation implies. If many world inhabitants distrust the US, it's not merely because they think we're a bunch of lucky duckies. It's because their analysis of global events indicates to them that the US too often uses its power to dominate other populations and to control the globe's resources.

Meanwhile, here at home, spectacle replaces analysis as all attempts to critique the post-Sept. 11 world in a way that includes a comprehension of what others on the planet feel about what is going on are marginalized. Memorial services, patriotic concerts, the proliferation of new flag products (shirts, hats, bandanas, midget flags, giant flags, etc.), companies designating one day a week as Patriotism Day, new War Update sections in our daily newspapers, TV news programs showing endless video footage of the war's progress, constant reference to the American people's goodness - each of these is an understandable reaction to the terrorist assaults, yet, woven together into a single ongoing expression of nationalistic emotion, these responses become part of a specialized environment that maximizes conformity and stifles--through a growth in the national community's sense of its own righteousness and infallibility--expressions of dissent. Such pressure is more troubling today than it was a half century ago because the methods for introducing it into our lives' most private arenas are more abundant now than ever before.

Look at the 1991 Gulf War as an example. One propaganda spectacle from that period should suffice to indicate some of the culturally complex methods that shape our thinking and emotions.

On Superbowl Sunday 1991, while Frank Gifford and his colleagues announced the game on ABC, their play-by-play commentary was spliced with live war-updates from the network's top newscaster, Peter Jennings. After awhile it was impossible for the viewing audience to tell which was the main attraction: the game or the war. But in reality, the question was irrelevant, The truth was that ABC had created a new kind of event: a hybrid form of entertainment that switched effortlessly back and forth between the "pastime" of real blood being spilled in a real war and another pastime, the football game's the highly disciplined athletic violence. An amazing simultaneity had been achieved: the crowd's roar was like a split-personality screaming in 2 voices at once -- one voice cheered on Baghdad's obliteration, the other shouted for running back Otis Anderson as he plunged off-tackle toward MVP immortality.

This display of athletics and patriotism was reinforced by a Disney-influenced halftime show that featured, among other things, a young child, surrounded by a chorus of other young children, singing, "You are my hero, you are everything I want to be" to US service people in the Gulf. As the boy's sweetly-warbled song turned the Florida air into an oozing goo of patriotic emotion, upbeat images of US military personnel periodically flashed on the tv. All this activity led up to a special live message, projected on the stadium's giant screen as well as on televisions across the nation, from President Bush. In his message, the president extolled the virtues of fighting a war in which goodness (i.e., the US) would triumph over evil (i.e., Iraq). As halftime ended and the 2 teams prepared to resume their battle on the field, fans waved flags and a patriotic jolt better than any crack high swept through the stadium crowd and the nation's millions of TV viewers. When the kickoff occurred, somewhere in the Middle East an Iraqi target was blasted off the face of the earth by a high-tech US weapon. The crowd cheered.

Events like the 1991 Superbowl raise politics to the level of pure spectacle. Such events -- with their efforts to induce a trance-like national pride, and their emphasis on the wholesomeness of the military mentality and the moral purity of those in power -- are not confined solely to the US and are not without precedent in the past. An example: Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 Triumph of the Will, the German film that is a classic of Nazi propaganda, includes many of the same elements that the 1991 Superbowl/Gulf War extravaganza included. Riefenstahl's film is alive, not with apparent hatred, but with the apparent power of goodness. Triumph is a feast of the images of such goodness: blond young men smiling and expressing male solidarity, buxom women working hard for the national good, a feel for the middle-European beauty of German cities and countryside, and a nighttime political rally -- at Nuremberg -- that, with lit torches and an almost churchly atmosphere, seems, not like a mundane political event, but rather like a futuristic mass in honor of everything mysterious and noble in the galaxy. The film's purpose was to create in the hearts of "good" Germans a sense of grand national destiny, a euphoric awareness of their historic mission to reorganize life on the planet in the name of a higher good that only they, among the world's peoples, were capable of comprehending. Nazism's deepest realities -- racism, hatred of democracy, its belief in the usefulness of genocide -- were hidden in the film behind images of happy nuclear families and individuals devoted to traditional values. In the end, those romanticized traditional values killed 6 million Jews and millions of other people.

Just as Triumph of the Will obscured the details of Nazism's character as a hate philosophy, so the 1991 Superbowl spectacle obscured the details of the US elite's political/economic ambitions with regard to the Middle East. It also hid some of the war's dirtier details -- for instance, the US government's willingness to expose its troops (and then to deny it did so) to chemical and biological weapons, and also the Pentagon's policy of killing Iraqi civilians as a way of trying to force the population into removing Saddam Hussein from power. Such a burial of the details shouldn't surprise us. Like Riefenstahl's film, the purpose of the 1991 Superbowl spectacle was not to provide us with objective war-related information while the game was going on, but rather to manipulate people emotionally. Adopting techniques similar to the ones used in the pro-Nazi documentary, ABC and the White House employed wholesome-looking images for the purpose of instilling in the viewer a grandiose sense of national superiority. All of this is part of the "language" of our identity.

Our environment is a language of images and symbols. We mock, but nonetheless are formed, by the language of the political speech - "speech" as in a multimedia thought- and mood-shaping event. Men or women, who play the part of virtual-reality creations designed for the purpose of reading concepts they don't understand from Teleprompters, are our modern sages. They speak with the same "eloquence" as does the poet who accepts the existing language, with its built-in biases and assumptions, without question. "Normal" language constantly declares the danger of "deviant" language - i.e., any unpopular dialect or mode of questioning/describing that is considered beyond the bounds of conventional cordiality or an "appropriate" level of seriousness.

Languages are all around us. How daring are we as poets in plumbing their depths?

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Interview with R. Bohm / Abalone Moon

In your poem "Now," the persona, even though part of the action, describes the events in an almost journalistic manner. In "Spirit Force," the persona describes an unorthodox character who emerges as a rescuer, apart from the fighting, who is nonetheless centered in his role of medivac.

How do you connect the persona in "Now" to the character created in "Spirit Force." Are the two visions connected in any way?

Let me start with the "Now" poem. What you refer to as the narrator's journalistic tone has to do, I think, with the narrator's psychological state. Emotionally and physically exhausted, he's incapable of over-describing or rationalizing what he sees. He can't bring himself to say more than, "I see this. Now I see that. Now I . . ."

Of course, such a listing of apparent facts can at first glance seem journalistic--as if the speaker's reporting on things as opposed to being involved in them. But if we stop thinking of writing styles for a minute--of poetry versus journalism or whatever--and just think of the different ways people confront what's in front of them, then it's fairly clear, I think, that the narrator's tone entails a resignation to, if not a total acceptance of, the specifics of what's right before him, the corpse. And so the poem begins with him talking about the details of the corpse's appearance. Rather than resisting this depressing sight by thinking of something else or turning away, the persona instead gives up any hope of escaping from it and therefore surrenders to it.

Implicit in this giving up, there is a lucidity, not a calm lucidity maybe, but still a lucidity. In other words, for this moment at least, the narrator's capacity to see clearly is directly related to his being defeated--defeated by what he sees, by his weariness, by everything going on. There is no escape for him. There is only this now. He lives in it. He itemizes it. He is wedded to it. He is it. There's nothing else, nothing more, only this.

Ultimately, though, there is more. This "more" has to do with the clarity of the narrator's seeing, a clarity which sets in motion a train of thought, a reverie. By not turning away, by risking the disorientation of looking straight at what's there and being open to the potential meaninglessness of it all--by doing this, the narrator's heart and mind say yes to what is and to the damage done to them by what is.

When this kind of thing happens to us, there is, from that point on, I think, a shift in the mind--its conditioning and predispositions are gone, at least for awhile. As a result the mind then follows its logics wherever they might lead, even into apparent illogic. No attempts at censoring or moralizing or fitting the experience into prefabricated boxes are made. It's almost as if the mind's in a state of meditation, all focus, no resistance.

What this means in terms of the poem is that the poem moves casually, with little harping on its destination, toward a feeling, either momentary or more deep-rooted than that, of suicide or total exhaustion or despair or something similar. Whatever happens at the end of the poem isn't exactly defined, but there's a mood there, a provocation to thought, that is, I hope, quite clear. The reader has to take it from there.

I hope this describes at least some of the psychology in "Now." But what you really want to know is how this relates to the medic in "Spirit Force."

In response to that, first let me say I think your question hints at the possibility that these two people represent different personality types or maybe different worldviews. That alleged difference can I guess be summed up in this way: the "Now" narrator's so-called journalistic way of expressing himself makes him seem, at least on the surface, more inclined to observe than to act, whereas the medic seems to possess a life-force quality that's rooted in an inclination to just dive into existence without restraint. Although there's some truth in viewing the characters this way, it's not how I view them. I see something else. This "something else" is where I have to begin.

I see commonality between the two men. The somewhat eccentric but nonetheless heroic medic is no more of a world-banger, no more "involved" in life, than the other poem's speaker, and the other poem's speaker is no more observant than the medic. Look at it this way. Picture the medic and then imagine what he has to observe, what he has to report to himself, in order to successfully navigate the fire zone and save the wounded man. He has to pay attention to the placement of friendlies in the area, he has to identify the locations from which the enemy's fire originates, he must determine the elephant grass's height and how much it might impede his movements, he has to choose the best angle from which to approach the wounded grunt, he has to dodge gunfire and hand grenades and maybe land mines, and on and on and on. This man is observing and filtering an abundance of data in a matter of seconds.

Now picture the speaker in "Now." He and his platoon come upon a dead fellow grunt. The speaker mentally enters into the fact of that corpse with the same intensity that the medic displays in entering the fire zone when rescuing the man whose leg was lost. The speaker's engagement with the corpse, his surrender to its thereness and to the hopelessness that the corpse's mutilation represents to him--this act entails as much involvement in life as anything the medic does. So, you see, I don't at all accept it as a given that "Now"'s narrator and the medic in "Spirit Force" are by definition opposites.

Although their commonality might not be clear at first glance, I hope that readers, after thinking about the poems, will sense the commonality and then appreciate it for what it is: two individuals' shared inclination to immerse themselves in the realities of which they are a part. As a writer, I can't stay away from this type of theme. It's like in one of William Carlos William' early poems--actually, a turning point poem for him--in which he enters into "the filthy Passaic river" and the river in turn, he says, "enters my heart," eddying dirtily and with its foul smell into him while strangely revealing to him "the beginning of days."

That's it, the only type of baptism I believe in. This is why I'm preoccupied and amazed by the ways in which people immerse themselves in what is and change themselves in the process. Of course, also amazing but in a different way, are the methods we adopt in our efforts to flee such immersion-- flee it because, in a doomed and fruitless craving to avoid pain, we delude ourselves into thinking we can hide from reality.

We can't.

I'm glad that you explained the similarities between the two personae because I felt that there was a very germane connection between the two.

In your poem "Now," the characters burn huts in a small village. The end line of the poem is "Finally, only a sniper's bullet or a tripwire away, tranquility's within reach." What does the word "tranquility" mean to the persona in this poem?

Well, I've already said a lot about "Now," but this question about the end is a good one.

The calm or peacefulness hinted at in the poem's last lines, the ones you just quoted, is first and foremost a wished-for conclusion to pain. It's not just death itself that has gotten to the speaker but also what it has triggered: the mind's spasms as it sees things differently; for instance, the "paddies' senseless green" and a wound "as dark as a myna bird" whose language is like "the endless yakking of dumb or desperate men "

So, there's this suicidal impulse, an impulse rooted in the speaker's resignation to the fact that the war--the reasons for fighting it, etc.-- no longer possesses meaning for him. Or at least not the same meaning it once had. The speaker's experiences have opened him up to a new insight: a sense of people's helplessness in the face of forces beyond their control, not just in the middle of the war but also back in the states in the deadening routinization of people's daily lives. It is this feeling, among others, this sense of bleak ploddingness, that results in his mind straying toward the image of "Bonnie punching in at the transistor plant / on Rt. 110 back home."

So, you see, the tranquility mentioned in the poem's last lines is ironic in that it's not the kind of tranquility we usually think of. Instead, it's the dreamt-of tranquility that the potential suicide fantasizes about as he or she watches meaning drain from the world.

But there's another, more subtle and tangential, aspect of tranquility in the poem too. This aspect has to do with the unique calm that comes from resigning oneself to an unromanticized reality. There may be a desolation in the midst of this calm, but it nonetheless has something going for it: it's a turning point. Only now can one begin the work of reassembling the shattered spirit and healing the mind and heart.

Would you talk a little about your poem, "Winter Note to Adriana," about its meaning to you?

Well, if I was successful, the poem's about a certain poise in seeing, a state of mind that's more interested in grasping things as they are than in imposing itself on them. In other words, it's about seeing clearly, specifically that aspect of seeing clearly that strives to overcome the tendency to simplify multiplicity in ways that obscure reality. "Winter Note" is pretty straightforward, I think, in the way it talks about how the search for an ordering principle in things is often an attempt to flee a "wildness" that "panics us."

But it is precisely this wildness, this unfetteredness, this apparently chaotic interconnectedness of things, that the speaker views as order. This is why he accepts the fact that "Completely beyond logic, / the tree exists" and why he describes the tree's pandemonium of branches as being "like thoughts in a mind that meditates / on everything at once." The narrator's vision implies an interrelatedness between all things, including himself and others. There's also an insinuation here that the very "disorder" in nature that can panic us can also, if we accept it, guide us to a higher level of seeing.

In "Excursion," as in many of your poems, the persona is alone. How do you relate this character to the personae in your poems dealing with your other themes, including the major theme of war?

Well, many speakers in my poems are motivated by types of uprootedness or dislocation. As such, they either try to overcome isolation or to describe powerful, and often psychologically contorting, connections to the world. "Excursion"'s speaker is an example. Aging, he recalls an ex-lover or wife. In the process he experiences loneliness but also a kind of at-oneness with the world when he sees "a clearing where what the grass has to say / is massaged by sunlight into silence." Of course, this can also be a death image, which complicates it a bit.

Anyway, you're right, the lone speaker plays a key role in my poetry. The reason for this is simple: no matter how much our voices may ultimately connect us to others, the act of speaking at its most basic level is about a reaching out from the point of our individuality, our aloneness, to the world beyond us. In this sense, remaining faithful to a particular voice's details or a particular mind's thoughts is an obsession with me because it's the only way I know of rooting a poem in reality. Thoughts and actions don't come out of nowhere, they arise from the combustibility of a particular personality in relation to a range of forces that are often beyond that personality's control. I try to get at this fact in my poetry.

Part if doing this, I believe, lies in not censoring myself in terms of subject matter. This is why as a writer I immerse myself as much in the physical and psychological violences of war as I do in the weird engineering of the horse nettle in the spring field, or why authoring a poem about someone in crisis means just as much to me as describing fox prints in the snow or a sax riff in a city park or the collision between races or how an IMF decision in America results in the mass planting of eucalyptus trees in India--trees that drain water from farmfields and as a result the farmers organize and rip up the trees. Conflict and unity of all types--between peoples, between humankind and nature, between different ways of seeing, and so on--are what I'm drawn to. The range, the possibilities, between those two poles obsesses me.

In your poems many of the personae are rooted in time and place, and also there is a quality in many of your other poems of a wandering through different times and places. How do you feel these different aspects are connected in your poetry?

I think I just gave part of the answer to this question a few minutes ago in the stuff I said about using voices and personalities other than my own in certain poems. Those voices and personalities are related to what you said about rooting poems in time and place.

But the other part of your question, the part where you talk about sensing in some of my work "a quality of wandering through different times and places," this aspect of what you've asked is something I haven't talked about yet and I'm glad you've given me a chance to say something about it since, at least to me, it's an important issue.

There's no writing about a thing or an event or a mood without saying something about it's texture. And texture isn't just about something's feel--it's about the combination of things that create that feel. Take textiles as an example. If we say about a certain material that its texture is coarse, we mean that the material's various threads or strands are interwoven in such a way as to produce that coarse feel.

It's the same way with a moment's or a personality's texture--various threads of experience, emotion, history, etc. contribute to the "feel." What this means to me as a writer is shown, at least a little bit, in "Reception."

At the poem's beginning the speaker enters a dusk village about which he says, "I lived here once. Now I don't." Then we find out that the previous day the narrator's niece was married somewhere nearby and that now, in a brief while, a reception is to be held for the newlyweds in an abandoned pump factory and that, because the narrator must attend the reception, he can't remain in the village he has just entered.

As a result, the narrator prepares to go to the unused factory which is characterized, he says, by "the fertile presence / of the absence of drill presses and lathes."

In all these images--the village, the factory, etc.--the present is everywhere inhabited by, and given additional depth by, the past, which means that although a real landscape is being described, it isn't just depicted literally but is also shown psychologically and historically in terms of intersections between different time periods and so on. Later in the poem, even more strands are woven into this texture when hints of the war in Iraq become part of the weave, as does a sense of historical movement from generation to generation.

Additionally, in the course of the poem the very meaning of "reception" undergoes, I hope, an evolution. The title refers to the party being held for the newlyweds, but also to the speaker's reception into the village where he once lived but now doesn't. And another aspect of the reception idea is the speaker's movement through an environment that stimulates in him a need to be receptive or open to reality's fullness.

I think the types of goings-on, and the vision that underlies them, that I just described as occurring within "Reception" are reflective of why you sometimes sense in my work "a quality of wandering through different times and places." The way I look at things, moments and persons are never static; instead, they're sites of endless activity--they are crossroads where the mental and historical traffic is always hurtling this way and that between now and then or between one phenomenon and another. The only way to get at this reality, this teemingness, is to give voice to the different time frames, locations and so on that coexist within particular moments and psyches.

For me, such simultaneities lie at the very heart of meaning, are meaning. Of course it's sometimes equally important to boil things down to a split second of focus in which a fragment of reality, seen simply and clearly in itself without reference to other things, burns with such lucidity in our minds that nothing else is needed for us, at least briefly, to comprehend the world. That's another pole of meaning.

This range--from the thing in itself to the moment as the site of innumerable simultaneities and interactions--I guess this is ultimately what I'm after in my work--in addition, that is, to some of my more obvious goals like confronting in my poetry all subjects, including political ones, without fearing the disapproval of those who promote the bland, conformist writing that characterizes too much U.S. literature these days.

Thanks for taking my work seriously enough to talk with me about it.

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From Indochina to Iraq and the Destruction of Meaning

A veteran's thoughts on the eve of a new war

-- Published by Green Party Newscenter --

       Almost half a century ago, Larry Fries wrote how chemical weapons could create a surreal cocoon of safety in the midst of a landscape that, although once alive with crops or wild growth or people, now was a site of silent emptiness.

                                                                                             A mile on either side . . .
                                                                                             Safe is nothing growing.

        A US soldier in Vietnam, Fries saw firsthand how the military industrial complex promoted the use of chemicals like agent orange and napalm on a so-called enemy society. By turning Vietnam into a laboratory for conducting chemical experiments in obstacle removal, the US armed services taught grunts like Fries the military efficiency of killing not only enemy soldiers but also the very land they lived on. Such devastation¹s totalistic character eventually resulted in millions of Vietnamese dead, a nearly destroyed ecosystem, and untold numbers of US soldiers years later suffering and dying from chemical weapons-related illnesses.

        But not only were people and land destroyed, so was the very meaning of things as the gap between "seems to be" and "actually is" expanded. We seemed to be a democratic force fighting for the Vietnamese people¹s political freedom but what we actually were was a mass of armed invaders who slew the very people we were supposed to liberate.

        Such an experience of the war led Fries to understand how the powers that be forcibly morphed ordinary words into disguises for ominous realities. Giving an example of this, Fries wrote:

                                                                                        Peace is tons of napalm falling.
                                                                                        A gamble where it lands.

        The idea that scorching sections of the world with napalm is a pro-peace activity is the type of linguistic reversal of meaning that George Orwell depicted in his novel, 1984, in which the Ministry of Truth was the agency in charge of disseminating propaganda and lies, and the word "joycamp" meant forced labor camp. Orwell would have understood exactly what Fries meant when the poet wrote with melancholy sarcasm, "Peace is tons of napalm falling." According to Orwell, the purpose of mainstream language in a society run by an over-powerful state isn¹t to facilitate communication but to reinforce the state¹s world-view and "to make all other modes of thought impossible." In such an environment of corrupted significations, previously stable meanings transform into each other in unpredictable ways. Consequently, moral incoherence reigns ¬ e.g., peace equals mass destruction.

        The status quo's assault on what Orwell called non-desirable modes of thought doesn't necessarily mean outright censorship. For the status quo's purposes, it is sufficient that there be a gradual narrowing down of meanings so that language's capacity to undermine authoritarianism, alienation and oppression is weakened in an evolutionary way over time. When language's power shrinks in this way, society's subgroups often seek out non-verbal languages that they believe express their frustrations and aspirations better than the dominant language does. Such non-verbal languages inevitably begin as outlaw vocabularies ¬ multiple tattoos, body piercings, spiked hair, baggy pants, overly extravagant gold chains, slam dancing, mass gatherings of dissenters, etc. ¬ that are screams against the falsity of existing language, wisdom, and political morality.

        We're at a stage like this now. The appearance of meaning-seeking black-masked anarchists among us is one symptom. The antiwar movement is another.

        Mounting numbers of U.S. citizens are grasping the insanity built into much U.S. political dialogue. On March 17 Bush proclaimed about the coming assault on Iraq that "a broad coalition is now gathering to enforce the just demands of the world" because "when evil men plot chemical, biological and nuclear terror" it is appropriate that the US rise to the occasion by leading a global army against the foe.

        Bush spoke these words in a solemn imperial tone designed to emphasize his speech's sobriety. Yet for all of its imperial seriousness, much of the speech was ludicrous. Bush's contention that he was about to lead "a broad coalition" against Iraq was an unabashed fabrication, given the fact that the US's attempt to create such a coalition had ended only hours previously in fiasco and defeat in the UN security council, thereby sentencing Washington to start a second gulf war with only a tiny fraction of the support it had in 1991 for the first gulf war.

        Even more absurd was Bush's depiction on March 17 of Iraq as a formidable power in possession of alarming amounts of chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. In reality, the US isn't preparing to invade Iraq because Iraq is militarily strong and therefore a danger to others in the world. Rather the US has targeted Iraq for the exact opposite reason: because Iraq, after its defeat in 1991 and its subsequent social-economic deterioration as a result of more than ten years of economic sanctions, is one of the globe's feeblest military countries and can't possibly defend itself against the US.

        Iraq's military weakness lends itself to the achievement of Washington's three main goals: (1) a victory that results in greater US control over the region's oil supplies, (2) a victory that establishes the US as the sole military power capable of policing and shaping a "reborn" Middle East and (3) a stage ¬ i.e., Iraq and its people ¬ upon which the US can send the rest of the world a message: look in shock and awe at the apocalyptic destructiveness of our weaponry and forever after be on notice that any nation or dissident group that dares to mess with us runs the risk of total obliteration. This of course is the language of empire building.

        When Bush stared into the camera on March 17 and announced about Saddam Hussein that "the tyrant will soon be gone," the president earned no credibility as an honorable warrior. On the contrary, his cockiness was more akin to the demented self-congratulation of a fake Romeo whose biggest love-conquests have come about after using rohypnol, the date rape drug, on his victims.

        Neither love nor peace is an activity that the criminally aggressive admire. As Bush has already shown, if in order to get satisfaction he must rape the Iraqi people and ignore the majority of world opinion in doing so, he will do it.

        More could be said about Washington's war policy, but further commentary can be postponed until Bush¹s and his compatriots' trials as war criminals. Right now we must take to the streets in massive expressions of democratic dissent.

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Beyond the Sentimental to the Real

-- Published by The Pedestal Magazine --

Regarding the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, one woman interviewed on television remarked, "I've been reminded of how fragile, and sacred, life is. I realize now how important it is to be good." When asked to specify what she meant by good, the interviewee couldn't do so.

Adyakkilakkamma, a 13th century woman poet from India, wouldn't have been comfortable with such vagueness. She insisted that our sense of the sacred isn't distinguishable from the specific actions that are impelled into existence by that sense. In fact, she proclaimed, there is no sacred sense at all unless it is incarnated in some type of "doing." Unimpressed by claims of spirituality that weren't evidenced in a willingness to participate in a life-long rough and tumble engagement with the world, she wrote

                                                                  Remember:
                                                                                    the real meaning
                                                                                    of the saint's speech
                                                                                    emerges
                                                                                    only through action.

                                                                                    Devotion with no action
                                                                                    gets you no place -

                                                                                    it's like trying to use
                                                                                    a piece of straw
                                                                                    to hold up a wall
                                                                                    that's all of a sudden
                                                                                    collapsing.

On Sept. 13, two days after the terrorist attack, a man of European heritage attended a meeting. Of the 8 people there, one of them was a woman he knew. She was from India. During the course of the meeting, the subject of the terrorist attacks came up. Having heard the night before on television that Osama Bin Laden may have been involved, the man now said angrily, "All foreigners should be killed for this."

"What?" the woman replied. "So you want to do to them what you call them uncivilized for doing to you?" She was the only immigrant in the room. And one of only two women.

The fellow responded, "Well, they started it."

Tartly, the woman snapped, "I don't care who started it, you're wrong, because if you keep talking like that soon people will start killing foreigners, including me, in the street."

The man answered, "But I don't mean you when I talk about foreigners. You're not a foreigner; we all know you."

If anything, this made the woman angrier. "What you just said is the fucking stupidest thing of all," she told him, losing her temper. "I or somebody else won't get killed just as long as we personally know you, but if we happen not to know you then we get our asses kicked! Great! You're not supposed to respect people's rights only if you know them. You're supposed to respect their rights even if you don't."

The woman was correct. The man with whom she argued was capable of feeling solidarity with the New York and Washington D.C. dead and their families, but not with a wider range of people. In spite of the fact that immigrants and people of color were included in the terrorist death tolls, this man primarily viewed the U.S.'s plight as one of us against them, with the "them" representing darker skinned people from certain parts of the globe, as well as their immigrant "allies" here.

This man, and other people like him, consider themselves respecters of life. One of the proofs they give of this respect is the sadness they feel about the victims of the terrorist attacks. But this sadness is not a pure or simple sadness. It is a sadness with a political dimension. It is an emotion that announces "I am a good American" as much as it reflects a feeling of loss.

Except for the families and friends of the killed and wounded, most of us simply will not grieve for the dead and injured the way we would grieve for our own family members and friends. This is understandable and there is nothing wrong with it. But we should understand what it means. What it means is that our talk about "tragedy" and the "grief we feel" is highly symbolic. It has little to do with the personal grief that most of us have experienced at one time or another, the kind felt this week by the friends and loved ones of the dead and injured. The grief the rest of us feel in the attacks' aftermath, although real to us, is a more general kind of grief, a form of nationalistic self-definition in a situation in which we don't know what else to do, other than unite through shared feelings.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks, the country is shaken by emotion. Some people respond to this by suggesting that we must now have no bickering among ourselves, that it is time for the ultimate unity of group sadness, that "stridency" and "debate" aren't what we need, but rather a unified decorum of grief. To question this so-called decorum is to risk being called self-centered, someone who doesn't feel the appropriate respect, even reverence, for the group's grief.

At a time like this, it's easier to give into mass emotion than it is to try to think clearly about what's going on. Not surprisingly, the first thing that happens when mass emotion becomes our guideline for how to behave is that we start resenting the dissenters, the ones who say, "Wait a minute. Shouldn't we stop for a while and analyze the situation?" But mass emotion wants no analysis. It wants the self-congratulation, the self-righteousness, of its collective grief. It does not want to be disturbed. It wants to establish itself as the only allowable etiquette of the moment. It wants power.

Unlike most nations in the world, the U.S. has never been invaded. Therefore, the terrorist attack has a special meaning for us. Startled and confused, we wonder: How could this happen? We've been fortunate. In the past, we've been able to consider our soil safe.

But we only have to look at our history to realize how possible such an attack was. In fact, a close examination of our history shows us that the continent was once before the victim of an even larger scale, more violent invasion. Armies, mercenaries and land-grabbers piled onto the continent from Europe, killed most of the indigenous inhabitants and terroristically took over the land. That we in turn would one day suffer a terroristic attack wasn't a physical impossibility; after all, the continent wasn't in the past and isn't now immune to outside penetration.

Of course, this analysis doesn't mean the Sept. 11 terrorist attack was justified. It just places our anger at that attack into context. And in fact, the details given above are quite relevant. The historian, Arnold Toynbee, once said that only a country like the United States, which had stolen all its land from other peoples (the native tribes), could think it was a good idea to take the Palestinians' land and create Israel out of it in partial recompense for crimes that were committed, not in the middle east, but in Europe.

Since the Palestinian question stands at the center of many U.S differences with the Islamic world, Toynbee's remarks are not foolish. They should be meditated upon.

        In his poem "An Eye, Open," Paul Celan (1920-1970), both of whose parents died in a concentration camp and who himself was compelled to do road labor in Moldavia during WWII, says -

                                                                                      Aching depth of the eyeball:
                                                                                      the lid

does not stand in its way, the lash

does not count what goes in.

This eyeball about which Celan writes is the enemy of our current Mass Emotionists. They view it as a thing to be hated, to be stomped to jelly beneath their feet. To see with a focus in which nothing is allowed to stand in the way of clarity, this is a sin to the Mass Emotionist. With the same rage that the white supremacist Aryan Nation member feels toward the black and the Jew, the Mass Emotionist loathes Celan's open eye, the unprotected eye ("the lid / does not stand in its way, the lash/ does not count what goes in") that risks its health in order to see.

Clarity of seeing, of thought, is bad. "Go to the back of the class," the Mass Emotionist teacher says. "You are not one of us. You are not well-behaved."

And so the isolation begins. The isolators think of themselves as pure and nice and very sensitive. "We are isolating the deviants for their own good, as well as for the group's good" the isolators say.

In the "Instead of a Preface" section to her poem "Requiem," the Russian writer Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) spoke about what it was like to stand in line day after day outside the Leningrad prison where her son was locked up during the Stalin years.

The section reads as follows:

"In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once someone ‘recognized' me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard of me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there): ‘Can you describe this?' And I answered, ‘Yes, I can.' Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face."

Some U.S. writers naively like to think they are brave like Akhmatova -- this woman who described what wasn't supposed to be described, this poet expelled from the Soviet writers union because of her poetry and attitudes. But many of these writers are self-deluded.

Unlike Akhmatova who did not fit in with her own time's conventional mass emotions and who challenged those emotions in her own way, our current mass emotionalists wouldn't challenge the status quo, even a status quo flea, unless the flea was in chains. Such writers, although they take great pride in their sensitivity and so-called intelligence, will do little to jeopardize their safe position within the herd.

They want the poetry world to be a playground sandbox in which fathers and mothers stand over their children, making sure that the children follow the rules for "nice" talk. This pleasant or "correct" way of talking is the new language (a language that prioritizes "nice" fantasy over "bad" reality and so-called good manners over probing interrogation) the taste-makers want poets and others to adopt.

Anyone who loves poetry, or clarity, or decency rejects such an approach. Language is one of the swords referred to symbolically when Jesus, the Christian holy man, proclaimed, "I have come not to bring peace, but a sword."

The sword of clarity. Of focus. Of speaking out against zombie patriots who thrive on the sale of cheap emotion during difficult times.

When all the bodies are finally counted in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on NYC and D.C., the death toll will be in the thousands. It's impossible to know this and not grieve for the dead, the injured, and families and friends left behind. As a nation we won't recover quickly from this tragedy. The question is: Will we recover at all?

According to the president, Colin Powell and other cabinet members and government officials, we are preparing to strike back at the terrorist acts' orchestrators. This is not surprising. But who are we planning to strike back at? And are we certain they're the correct targets? And additionally, are there things we should know as a nation before striking back? We certainly need to know more than that members of Congress, most of whom we usually view cynically, are capable of singing America the Beautiful together on the Capitol steps. A public relations event like this - one designed to remind us that we having nothing to fear since Congressional members are "democracy's leaders" - is not a good reason to do anything, let alone go to war.

Of course, we don't have to wait for a formal military operation to be launched against Afghanistan or Iraq (or whatever other country we choose to punish) in order for the nation's retaliation to begin. It has already begun.

* Gunfire shattered windows in an Islamic Center in Dallas.

* In a Chicago suburb hundreds of angry predominantly white citizens marched on an Arab neighborhood in an effort to "punish" terrorists. Police arrested protest leaders in order to protect Arab Americans from violence. Across the country, numerous incidents have been reported of "Arab-looking" taxi drivers pulled from their cabs and beaten up.

* On Long Island in New York, an enraged man attempted to run over a Palestinian woman in a parking lot. This was one of scores of incidents nation-wide involving the harassment of Muslim women who were identified as such because of their veils.

* In a Philadelphia suburb, an off-duty Philadelphia police officer pulled his gun on a Palestinian clerk in a 7 & Eleven and threatened him with racial slurs in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.

* Some people say that such incidents aren't important because they pale in comparison to the number of dead and wounded from the terrorist attacks. Such people themselves have a terrorist mentality: they would sacrifice the innocent because of an event or issue that they claim is "more important" than crimes against certain individuals.

At a time like this we must be wary of those who would preach love of country above all else. Such claims too often entail secret agendas for targeting "outsiders" who for decades have been viewed as "unsanitary" or "backward" or "dark" or "barbaric" or simply not trustworthy by the majority community. Those discriminated against in such a manner are of course just as clean, forward, civilized and trustworthy as anyone else, sometimes more so because their wider variety of experiences as immigrants and/or outcastes has given them a reverence for life that many U.S. citizens, especially those who are white and better off, have lost as a result of having grown too used to possessing a more commodities-saturated lifestyle than most of the world's citizens.

This is a time to stand up and be counted. It's relatively easy to say "I grieve." It's more difficult, in a society which has traditionally displayed little respect for Muslims, to stand in solidarity with those very Muslims. And this is exactly what we should do. Poets, who like to consider themselves language experts, should reject the easy emotionalism of saying what's popular and instead use their communication skills to show respect for the Islamic way of life and an open-mindedness toward other, non-U.S. ways of looking at the world and global conflicts.

Such understanding, more than any missiles, will diminish terrorism long-term.

I'll end these notes with an excerpt from a poem, section 7 of "Qur'anic Meditations." The section is a meditation on Sura 19, verses 15-25:

        I can't think straight,
         but I'm saved because of this:
         I never saw a mutilated piece
         of human flesh I wouldn't kiss
         or a torturer whose skull I wouldn't crease
        with a blunt instrument if I had to.
        Believe me, jihad's not a war cry
        but a dance life-celebrators do
        to show nightmares their defiance.
        Today, each dancer is like a pregnant woman,
         who, fatigued by movement and mirth,
         finally falls to the ground in labor, cursing heaven.
         In response, Allah feeds her dates as she gives birth.
         The next thing we know, here's Jesus,
         then the rest of us and the placenta.
        Mary eats another date, sniffs some fetal mucous,
        then dozes off, while studying the evening sky, a rare magenta.
        The palm tree beneath which she sleeps,
         and the stream washing stones near her ankles,
         and the boulder upon which the lizard creeps,
         all are here, in the oasis.

Soon it's night.
The desert breeze is gentle.

Tonight, at least, we'll know no harm.
Newborns, we sleep in our mother's arms.

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All Roads Lead to Fallujah

-- Published in Newtopia --

1. What Movement?

          Kerry supporters hoped for a miracle. They didn’t get it. That’s when the whining began in some quarters, and the keep-your-chin-up dreaminess in others. The full spectrum of left self-delusion was on display.

          Editor Mathew Rothschild of The Progressive was appalled that in Kerry’s concession speech the defeated candidate announced, “We must stand together and succeed in Iraq” and further philosophized that in the post-election period Americans “are required now to work together for the good of our country. In the days ahead, we must find common cause, we must join in the common effort, without remorse or recrimination, without anger or rancor.”

          Rothschild’s response to the Democrat was, “No way! . . . How dare you demand that we join up with Bush!”

          Under certain circumstances such words might represent a commendable fighting spirit. But exactly what was Rothschild bemoaning? Surely he wasn’t unaware that the candidate in whom he was so sorely disappointed was, far from being a progressive, a standard-bearer of status quo politics, a man who possessed a Mideast vision that in the final analysis was remarkably similar to Bush’s. Given this, why wouldn’t Kerry suggest that we should unite in an effort for victory in Iraq?

          It wasn’t Kerry’s concession speech statements that were the surprise, it was Rothschild’s lunacy in expecting the defeated candidate to say anything else.

          Of course, there were other progressives who were more upbeat in defeat. Example, Molly Ivins. Rather than analyzing the relationship of Kerry’s unimpressive 20-year Senate record to his inability to ignite the electorate, she chose, after a bit of warm-up humor, to beat the drum for individual do-goodism. “So, fellow progressives, stop thinking about suicide or moving abroad. Want to feel better? . . . join something, send a little money to some group, call somewhere and offer to volunteer, find a politician you like at the local level and start helping him or her to move up.”

          Of course, there’s nothing wrong with volunteerism, but we should be clear on exactly what Ms. Ivins recommended: a recipe for how morose progressives in the world’s sole superpower can regain their pre-election heads-in-the-clouds perkiness, not a guideline for how to stop the Democratic-Republican war in Iraq before another 100,000 Iraqi civilians are killed.

          Let’s face it, the edge has gone out of U.S. politics. We don’t have debates anymore, we have public relations spectacles during which what a candidate claims to believe isn’t the product of unfettered analyses but rather of positions endlessly shaped and reshaped by pollsters, focus groups, professional think-tankers, speechwriting teams, etc. Whether it was Bush’s refrain that “Americans are safer” following the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq or Kerry’s mantra that “If we're going to create jobs, the first thing we have to do is make sure that George W. Bush loses his,” what we were exposed to wasn’t dialogue but the transformation of speech into a sequence of spoken ads. The debates typified this. Instead of a philosophical back and forth during which the candidates responded to each other’s comments with spontaneous comebacks meant to devastatingly analyze the opponent’s last remark, the candidates took turns mouthing pieties and platitudes written by their handlers days and weeks earlier. In such a context words operate more like Pavlov’s bells than grammatical bearers of meaning: they are designed to make the targeted audience salivate, not to illuminate what confuses or alienates us or makes us feel dread.

          Of course, none of this should surprise us. In a world where the old saw “beauty lies in the eye of the beholder” has given way to the reality that beauty resides in the hands of the manufacturers who produce the toiletries, silicon, gym equipment, cosmetics and diet pills that make people good to look at, the fact that the value of our political candidates is in the hands of those who manufacture those candidates’ opinions and public presence is predictable.

          It’s not a candidate’s intrinsic worth as a human being or leader that is prized, but rather the candidate’s capacity to advertise, just as a silicon implant in a breast does for its manufacturer, the indispensability of those who produced the product. From tax policy to hairstyle, from degree of affection for Jesus to each hand movement, a candidate isn’t a consciousness in the process of evolution but a item for consumption in need of continual updates.

          Bush defeated Kerry not because Bush possessed a political vision better suited to the U.S. public than Kerry, but because Bush grasped better than Kerry that in order to sell what is essentially uninteresting (i.e., either of the candidates) it’s not political awareness that’s necessary but the shrewd use of advertising psychology. In such a context, a candidate’s beliefs are less about what the candidate believes than they are about adopting poses meant to make the candidate saleable as a savior figure through whom people can vicariously experience what is missing from their own lives: a sense of completion. As far back as 1926, Helen Woodward, a copywriting expert, articulated the way in which the successful advertiser gains control over people by providing them with illusory feelings of power and fulfillment rather than real power and fulfillment. “To those,” Woodward wrote, “who cannot change their own lives or occupations even a new line in a dress is often a relief. The woman who is tired of her husband or her home or a job feels some lifting of the weight of life from seeing a straight line change into a bouffant, or a gray mass into a beige. Most people do not have the courage or the understanding to make deeper changes.” (Helen Woodward, Through Many Windows, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1926 , p. 298)

          Such a conception of selling, with its cynical view of the public as lacking inner strength and intelligence, became not only one of modern advertising’s dominant ideas but also the basis of the political marketing of candidates in the age of mass production, mass culture and mass audiences.

          Given this background, it is easy to see how our arguments during the recent elections about who was the superior presidential candidate weren’t meditations on what’s good for society or what kind of world we want our children to inherit, but were rather skirmishes about marketing techniques, about which set of handlers, the Republican or Democratic, had designed the better promotional strategy for selling their product. With the hubris of a superpower population fixated on its own internal debates, we mistook national self-absorption for an attempt to intelligently prioritize the dilemmas facing us. For Bush supporters. the specter of gay marriage was more important than the possibility of increased global violence unleashed by a strategy of empire-building through preemptive wars. For Kerry supporters unnerved by his campaign’s inability to take off, the issue of whether or not Teresa Heinz’s outspokenness helped or hurt the campaign was more electorally significant than Kerry’s inability to comprehend that opposing Bush’s tax philosophy wasn’t the same thing has having a pro-people economic vision.

          Additional proof of the stunted range of political discussion during and after the election is strewn all over the national landscape. Just imagine trying to get either Bush or Kerry to publicly support the following statement: “We believe in democracy so much that we pledge to support the Iraqi people one hundred percent even if in the post-Saddam period they choose to aggressively agitate for Palestinians’ right of access to one of Islam’s holiest cities, Jerusalem.”

          So much for significant political differences on the Middle East.

          But this isn’t even the worst of it. The lack of serious reflection on the election’s possible insignificance reveals the degree to which the left’s mindset is mired in the predictable. There is much talk about the right’s capturing of the morality issue, Kerry’s failure to connect more viscerally with those experiencing economic insecurity, etc. but no discussion of the possibility that a two-year election season, draining as it did resources from the antiwar and globalization movements, simply wasn’t worth it. This failure to contemplate a very real option reflects an even deeper problem: that the left’s behavior during the election entailed a quasi-mystical hunt for insiderness through a whirl of activity that created the sensation of relevance without delivering real relevance’s power

          From this perspective, progressive leaders’ call to join the Kerry campaign didn’t result in a productive engagement with the actual but rather in the substitution of instant satisfaction for long-term goals. The philosopher Theodor Adorno once described such behavior as a sign of helplessness. His point was that immersion in a system which thrives on the exclusion of the masses from power increases the system’s ability to withhold that power. In this sense, Adorno argued, participation “is flight; not, as is asserted, from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance.” (Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Continuum Publishing Company, New York, 1994, p. 144)

          In the world envisioned by Adorno, involvement becomes surrender, a yes to the system becomes a no to all the possibilities that lie beyond the system. As Adorno understood, and as the U.S. progressive movement should learn, this flight from resistance, this plunge into the depths of the apparently practical, represents the triumph of consumerism, of mass society, in which the unremitting forward motion of everything -- the heist movie’s plot, the perpetual stream of new products, the pace of daily life -- makes it increasingly true that “sustained thought is out of the question” if one doesn’t want to be an outsider and consequently “miss the relentless rush of facts.” (Ibid., p. 127)

          So we give in to the inaction that endless action hides. We hurry from birth to death as if we don’t have a moment to lose. We prize failure in the present moment over the delayed gratification that might stem from long-term strategies that can only be born of sustained thought. The simple act of remembering that there is an idea called self-determination is beyond us, as is the effort to replicate the independent spirit of the 1930s worker upsurges or, later, the civil rights/black power movement. Consequently, instead of revolting we distract ourselves by supporting a political candidate for a few months or by microwaving a cup of mushroom soup. Meanwhile, we block out the possibility that the only true resisters left are the uninvolved: the malcontents, the civic duty haters, the nonvoters, the ones who are so fed up with status quo politics that they turn their backs on the system without even knowing that they’re rebelling

          And why shouldn’t the left’s natural constituencies -- the alienated, the economically exploited, the racially oppressed, those committed to full gender equality, the enemies of empire-building, etc. -- often act disinterested in what we have to say? After all, our calls for a better world are at best suspect, given that they regularly get bogged down in uninspiring mobilization efforts that, too undaring to express the full extent of people’s anger and disillusionment, refuse to say what needs to be said: the two-party system is completely fucked up and we have to demolish it and move beyond it. The fact that progressive Democrats used the most melodramatic language during the election to insist that voting for Kerry in 2004 was crucial to the progressive cause is a sign of this problem, a sign that highlights the left’s failure to adequately answer the question, “Progressive? Progressing toward what?”

          Kerry’s refusal to break with his party’s collusion in the U.S. movement to the right over recent decades placed him in the part-of-the-problem box, not in the solution box. Both Kerry’s Senate voting record and his inability to develop an innovative platform illustrated this beyond any doubt. Rather than being a trendsetter as a candidate, he took his stand smack dab in the middle of the Democratic Party’s ongoing abandonment of any desire to fill the role of an official left. Some of this abandonment’s highlights are:

          Forsaking all attempts to repeal the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act.

          Dismantling welfare and accepting the coincident descent of more women and children into poverty.

          Support of NAFTA.

          The building of a bipartisan coalition to oversee a 39% widening of the income gap between rich and poor over the last twenty years.

          The sponsorship of labor-management “cooperation programs” that have helped to decimate unions and turn what’s left of them into company unions.

          Democratic-Republican support of more tax breaks for corporations.

          A pattern of increasing the government’s right to invade people’s privacy, as in the case of the pre-Patriot Act Clinton-promoted expansion of FBI wiretapping power.

          Pondering this list sheds light on Nov. 2’s voter turnout. Although the turnout, estimated at approximately 59 percent, was the highest since 1968, in comparison to other industrialized nations the percent of nonvoters still remained embarrassingly high: two-fifths of those eligible to vote. This includes many young voters who, prior to the election, were described by Kerry supporters as motivated to turn out in large numbers to defeat Bush, yet when election day came they showed up in average, not apocalyptic, numbers.

          Similarly with labor. Although the AFL-CIO spent $45 million dollars to elect Kerry, establish “protect Kerry” brigades that worked to keep Nader off the ballot in a slew of states, and dispatch thousands of union members to monitor polling locations where Republican dirty tricks were feared, one out of every three union members still voted for Bush. Not only that, but union voters made up a smaller percent of the total number of voters than they did in both 2000 and 2002, raising the question, as did the youth vote turnout, “Why were Democrats incapable of sufficiently igniting enough voter fervor to defeat a president who not only lied about his reasons for going to war with Iraq but who also oversaw a record number of job losses during the last four years?”

          Easy but shallow answers to this question are abundant – e.g., Kerry was dull, he was too liberal, the party shouldn’t have been so strong on gay rights, too many progressives refused to get sufficiently involved in the race, and so on.

          The real answer, however, is more troubling: not only hard-core Democrats, but millions of independents and third party advocates underestimated the disgust with which many eligible but no-show voters view the current state of U.S. politics. Trying to convince these voters that an upper-crust status quo politician like Kerry will cure their alienation or save the country from its ills is like trying to persuade small-scale farmers that agribusiness is their friend: even the least savvy among them know a wooden nickel when they see it.

          So, in the end, what did those progressive leaders who bailed out on the movement in an effort to play the real politick game accomplish? Only this: they reinforced the Democratic establishment’s assumption that progressives can be taken for granted since even without meaningful enticements, progressive leaders flock to the party like sheep when the party’s spokespeople call. Meanwhile, the alienated, fed-up, oppressed and other marginalized inhabitants of nowheresville look at the progressive movement and ask, “What movement?”

2. Progressive Ignorance of the Real World: An Example

          The distance of key progressive groupings from what goes on in many people’s lives is illustrated in their attitude toward organized labor. Using language that oversimplifies union leaders’ role in combating trends like the increased offshoring of jobs, failure to raise the minimum wage, and the downward pressure on earnings resulting from globalization, left pundits like David Moberg of In These Times glorify the union establishment by arguing that “the labor movement is the key force resisting these trends; its work benefits members most but also boosts the fortunes of the unorganized.” (David Moberg, “Forge a Coalition with Labor, In These Times, July 15, 2004) The same assumption, i.e., that allying with organized labor is central to building a people’s movement, was expressed by Joel Rogers in an early 2004 article in The Nation. In advising progressives to vote for John Edwards in the primary, Rogers cited as one of Edwards main qualifications that “He is unabashedly pro-union.” (Joel Rogers, “Progressives Should Vote Edwards,” The Nation, Feb. 8, 2004)

          Yet for the average unionized worker, such enthusiasm about the labor movement, especially its alleged resistance to bad economic times, is at best questionable.

          And for good reason. Look at the UAW as an example. A summation of where it is now and how this relates to its history over recent years is enlightening.

          This past August in Fairfield, IL, 539 UAW members, who made up the workforce of the three local Airtex auto parts plants, voted by a margin of 65 percent to 35 percent to strike over concerns about health insurance, company attacks on seniority, and the threat of plant closings. The International UAW approved their decision. But then within a week of the strike’s inception, with no bargaining breakthroughs having yet occurred, the International suddenly ordered the strikers to retake their strike vote or risk (this was the order’s implication) the International’s withdrawal of strike support funds, including health care and a weekly stipend. The workers, facing the glum prospect of remaining on strike without strike benefits, gave up their demands and voted to return to work. The next day the struck plants, which manufacture water and fuel pumps for cars, were up and running again.

          The quickness of the Fairfield workers’ capitulation to the International isn’t surprising. Increasingly over recent decades the UAW ranks have learned through harsh experience that developing local strategies for dealing with a company that refuses to address worker needs is a dangerous enterprise. This danger stems not just from company aggression but also from the International’s abandonment of a strategy of empowerment through plantfloor struggle and its replacement with a vision of empowerment through pursuit of good union-company relations. Any local union that strays too far from, or outright rejects, this vision of labor-capital jointness risks becoming the target of the International’s wrath.

          A case in point was the International UAW’s suppression of Caterpillar workers in the mid-1990s.

          When Caterpillar’s workers went on strike in June 1994, it was with a sense of mission. The point of contention between union and company was management’s insistence on a new contract that would include (a) a dramatically weakened health plan, (b) the establishment of “flexible work schedules” that would let the company eliminate overtime pay in a variety of situations, (c) the creation of a two-tier employment system that would consist of paying new workers at a lower rate that would stop them from ever achieving parity with more senioritied workers, and (d) a shrinkage of the unionized workforce to be compensated for by the use of more part-timers and contract employees.

          As far as most union members were concerned, the company had drawn a line in the sand and the only option was to resist.

          But as the strike dragged on for 17 months, the workers initial sense of unity and purpose turned into something less euphoric, more desperate. One reason for this was the company’s success in maintaining pre-strike production levels through the use of scabs. But another, more psychologically devastating, reason for their anxiety was the sense that they had been betrayed by a supposed ally: the International. As one month turned into another, it became clear that the UAW’s Detroit headquarters was not committed to a victory at Caterpillar. Instead, the International backed away from the strike and started viewing the strikers as troublemakers. Consequently, not only did the International stop funding strike bulletins, it also refused to sponsor solidarity rallies or to approach customers and dealers in an effort to build a multifront strike support movement. In the end, almost a year and a half after the strike began, the International arranged a vote on a “new” company contract proposal that was almost exactly the same as the proposal the workers had originally rejected. (“Caught in CAT’s Claws,” Business Week, Dec. 4, 1995) The International’s recommendation to the strikers was to vote yes.

          The vote took place in early December 1995. In spite of the fact that the holiday season was upon them and strike-related financial troubles had undermined people’s sense of security and in some cases damaged their health, the strikers voted overwhelmingly -- 81 percent to 19 percent -- to reject Caterpillar’s offer, thereby rejecting both the company and the union’s top leadership in one fell swoop. This rebellion didn’t go unnoticed. Or unpunished. Frustrated with the workers alleged refusal to listen to reason, the International ignored the vote, called off the strike and ordered its members back to work the next day. As the Institute for Global Communications reported at the time, “Despite the UAW having over $900 million in the strike fund, the International leadership has ordered the workers back with no contract.”

          As with many other unions, the UAW’s transformation into a top-heavy organization that keeps its members in line with an iron fist didn’t happen overnight. The first indications of the UAW’s evolution into an enforcer of company policies occurred in the late 1940s and 1950s. During that period, the union’s increasingly centralized leadership reined in rank and file struggles for plantfloor rights while taking the philosophical position that wage gains and benefits, not issues of power or worker control, should be the union’s top priority.

          This trading away of the struggle for plantfloor power in order to win economic gains entailed the post-WWII UAW’s abandonment of one of its original organizing goals in the 1930s: labor’s right to have a co-say with capital in the organization of work. This trend continued for decades, eventually culminating in the early 1980s in the institutionalization of labor-management cooperation programs that officially subordinated worker demands to company needs. Motivated by the 1970s oil crisis and the emergence of Japan’s auto industry as a threat to U.S. companies, U.S. manufacturers in conjunction with UAW leaders developed a strategy for strengthening the industry -- and, theoretically, protecting workers’ jobs -- that was based on the notion that outmoded worker-rights ideas must give way to joint company-union efforts to increase productivity and efficiency, even if this meant dismantling important worker protections like contractual restrictions on speedup, etc.

          Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s this trend consolidated itself in every nook and cranny of the U.S. auto industry until the UAW’s transformation into a company union was complete. This was not, however, merely a philosophical transformation that expressed itself solely in how the union explained its goals. On the contrary, jointness spawned a fundamental structural change in the union. For the first time in the union’s history, contracts that were drawn up under the labor-management cooperation philosophy provided for the creation of a strata of unelected union officials to be appointed in every plant by local union leaders and management. Not being elected by the membership meant that these appointees were not accountable to the rank and file in any structured way. In areas like health and safety, quality production and competitive manufacturing, appointed reps played the role of explaining to both assembly line and skilled trades workers why company policies that “seemed” to cut into worker rights were actually in workers’ best interests. According to the Wall Street Journal, by 1990 approximately 10,000 such appointees made up a new bureaucracy within the union at General Motors plants alone. (Cited by Elly Leary and Marybeth Menaker in Jointness at GM, A New Directions Region 9A Publication, St. Louis, p. 44) The creation of this bureaucracy didn’t represent a mere shift in the union’s philosophy. It represented the abandonment of much of its previous philosophy and the formation within the union of a Trojan horse officialdom that the company used to systematically destroy any remaining hints of rank and file power.

          Yet as problematic as this structural change was in itself, its most devastating consequence wasn’t what it meant organizationally, but rather its psychological impact. As the UAW pursued the road of accommodation, it inched ever more deeply into an Orwellian world in which meaning and unmeaning morphed into each other, creating a realm where the gulf between appearance and reality often left workers grasping for something solid to hold onto as their world collapsed around them. This collapse was accompanied by the devolution of the UAW’s language into a tool for obscuring meaning rather than revealing it. Examples of this abounded. In its recommendation to vote yes on the proposed 1984 contract, the International informed members that the contract contained “an unprecedented job security program with far reaching protections against job loss.” (UAW-GM Report: Contract Highlights, UAW International, Detroit, 1984) The contract passed. Then in 1986, a year before the contract’s expiration, GM flamboyantly displayed what “unprecedented job security” meant by announcing plant closings that resulted in 30,000 lost jobs. In 1987, nine days after passage of a new contract that UAW headquarters hailed as “a milestone advance in job security,” (UAW-GM Report: Contract Highlights, UAW International, Detroit, 1987) GM proclaimed that it was streamlining its operation by closing certain plants. During the life of the contract, GM also announced other plant closings, including the Pontiac Fiero factory (2,000 jobs), the Lakewood Assembly facility (2,750 jobs) and Leeds Assembly (3,638 jobs).

          The UAW’s descriptions of reality were as accurate as George W. Bush’s claims years later that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and was conspiring with Al Qaeda against the U.S.

          As an aside, it is important to mention at this point that contrary to popular opinion, the propagandist who is interested in gaining, then holding onto, power isn’t unnerved or embarrassed by his propaganda’s inconsistencies. This is because successful propaganda is never one-dimensional and always works at more than one level. On the one hand it tells unquestioning devotees exactly what they want to hear while on the other hand it breaks dissenters’ spirits by wearing them down with endless examples of the unreliability and contradictory nature of all information. As the French philosopher Jacques Ellul argued accurately four decades ago, propaganda’s purpose is not merely to convince the propagandized of the accuracy of a particular way of looking at the world. Instead, it also entails, through the act of constantly bombarding consciousness with a vast variety of contradictory ways of viewing the world, an effort to unsettle consciousness so the propagandized becomes subject to a disorientation that “progressively takes over the whole of his being and leads to a general attitude of surrender.”

          The relationship of the UAW’s electoral goals during the 1980s to its internal policies is a good illustration of how a whole political strategy can be built upon contradictions that sow precisely such disorientation and surrender.

          No political phenomenon of the 1980s was targeted for resistance more vehemently by UAW leaders than Reagan’s commitment to trickle-down economics -- i.e., the idea that if you give economic breaks to the well-off, the well-off will invest the money saved from such breaks in such a way that eventually a portion of the new wealth propagated by these investments will seep down to working families and have-nots. Because of the UAW’s aversion to this vision, its CAP Council spent $1,424,731 million in the 1982 election to defeat Reagan and other candidates who supported his economic views.

          When Reagan won, the UAW, although frustrated, continued to fight his vision electorally. During the 1983-84 election season, the union again spent $1.4 million in CAP money to defeat fiscally conservative candidates; in 1987-88, they spent $2 million; in 1991-92, $2.3 million. Interestingly, these expenditures occurred during the decade when the labor-management cooperation strategy came to dominate the union, causing its reorganization. The irony is stunning: while publicly dumping millions of dollars into the battle against the trickle-down idea in the political arena, behind the scenes the union pursued that very same philosophy (i.e., the idea that catering to corporate needs will benefit the less powerful, in this case workers) within the auto industry.

          This contradiction wreaked psychological havoc on an auto workforce already stressed out by mounting job losses and plant closures. Although thousands of workers fought the union leadership through ad hoc plantfloor groups as well as through more formal organizations like the UAW New Directions Movement, the union leadership’s power, enhanced now by an army of appointees who systematically harassed dissenters on the plantfloor, wore down the resistance. An important part of this wearing down, as already stated, was the disorientation and anxiety spawned by the leadership’s methodical use of a policy language whose meanings were often the exact opposite of what the leadership claimed they were, much in the same way that in Orwell’s novel 1984 the totalitarian government invented a language of purposeful self-contradiction in which the agency in charge of disseminating propaganda and lies was called the Ministry of Truth and forced labor camps were called joycamps. Orwell correctly saw that in an environment dominated by a specific leadership or authority the purpose of the predominant language isn’t to facilitate communication but to reinforce the authority’s world-view and “to make all other modes of thought impossible.” In such an environment of corrupted significations, previously stable meanings transform into each other in unpredictable ways. Consequently, moral incoherence reigns -- e.g., peace equals mass destruction, programs for cutting jobs are called job protection policies, etc.

          Not surprisingly, as the UAW’s use of such tactics increased throughout the 1980s, the union membership grew more dispirited and cynical about the possibility of change. This psychological exhaustion was part of the debris left in the wake of the union’s transformation into a company union. The debris also included other realities: the UAW had grown more undemocratic, lost 45% of its membership, and given away significant economic and workers-rights gains that the union had won over the previous decades.

          All of today’s major unions have their version of this same story.

          Given this reality, the fact that progressive pundits like In These Times’ Moberg celebrate the labor movement as “the key force resisting” the ongoing disempowerment of both organized and unorganized workers is a disturbing commentary on the vacuity of much left analysis. Rather than praising organized labor, we should be pushing it to be more supportive of its own rank and file militants and to stop trying to crush reform movements like Teamsters for a Democratic Union, the UAW New Directions Movement and others. Unfortunately, though, comments like Moberg’s reflect a dispiriting reality: that at least one layer of the so-called progressive intellectuals group accepts the trickle-down idea, not necessarily in its economic dimension, but certainly in its philosophical dimension. These individuals believe, as many of them showed during the buildup to Nov. 2, that if we would only support those who are politically stronger than us (e.g., Democratic Party leaders) and help them to succeed, then some of their success will trickle down to the rest of us and we will be better off.

          If the progressive movement wants to be a true alternative, a serious left worthy of its name, it must discard such thinking and take the risk of forging an independent path. Relying on Democratic leaders for our success isn’t the answer. Creating our own leaders, ones who aren’t afraid to think outside the box, is.

          At no time has this been clearer than since the election. The election didn’t end on Nov. 2 or after Kerry’s concession speech on Nov. 3. It ended in the U.S. left’s failure to resist during the destruction of Fallujah.

3. All Roads Lead to Fallujah

          Examples of the Orwellian nature of mass communications in the information age are all around us. The UAW International’s transformation of language into a method of obscuring reality rather than evoking it is only one example. The Democratic Party’s development of an epistemology that allowed it to describe with a straight face the pro-war Kerry as an anti-war candidate is another. A third is the high tech-aided mass substitution of assertion for fact -- e.g., Colin Powell’s use of satellite photos of alleged WMD sites as a visual aid during his Feb. 5, 2003 UN discussion of Iraq’s “deadly biological and chemical weapons programs,” programs that in fact no longer existed.

          Taken all together, these examples barely hint at the nature of the problems facing us when it comes to information interpretation.

          We now live in what fifty years ago Marshall McLuhan called “the circuited city of the future.” He foresaw the emergence of a new society spawned by the rise of ever more sophisticated communications technologies. Correctly understanding that the historical phase of capital accumulation and industrial science had set in motion the evolution of a technological revolution in which communities would no longer be defined by the “huge hunks of real estate” they shared but rather by the information they either controlled or were dominated by, he prophesied the birth of the “information megalopolis,” a world characterized by masses of people endlessly inundated by barrages of disparate and often confusing informations. (Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage, Ginko Press, California, 2001, p. 72)

          McLuhan maintained that the new age of electronic communications would transform society’s relationship to knowledge more dramatically than any event since Guttenberg’s invention of the mechanical press laid the basis for the mass production of books. His basis for this formulation was that new technology-driven communications systems laid the basis for the instantaneous appearance (through television and later computerization, etc.) in people’s lives of colliding data and images from multiple fronts. For him, this information storm produced a state of “allatonceness” in which traditional logic, by nature linear and proceeding according to set stages, proved inadequate for the task of grasping meaning or deciphering truth in the midst of simultaneity. To do that, he insisted, required the development of thought processes that empowered the individual to discover patterns of coherence in the midst of contradictions, and to find the shifting figure of truth in the midst of a disfigured (and disfiguring) world.

          He summed up this insight by writing, in his book The Medium is the Massage, that the “electronic world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience coexist in a state of active interplay.” (Ibid, p. 63) Intuiting that pattern recognition entailed a kind of anti-logic that went deep-sea diving in search of a reality’s underlying rhythms rather than contenting itself with concentrating on discrete facts, McLuhan understood that “whoever sharpens our perceptions” in the new age “tends to be antisocial; rarely ‘well-adjusted,’ he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond exists among antisocial types in their power to see environments as they really are.” (Ibid, p. 88)

          In other words, liberation from an ideological prison requires developing a strategy for transcending the dominant ways of thought and expression, of disadjusting ourselves to the so-called real.

          This is no easy task. As that ultimate outsider, queer author and ex-con Jean Genet, wrote in 1970 the attempt to communicate oppression and alienation must entail a willingness to offend, to travel beyond the margins of the acceptable, to shed our ties to the very structures and values which claim to provide us with meaning in daily life. In this context, Genet discusses the development of a “separate language,” one that exists outside the pale of ordinary language and that simultaneously appalls and liberates because of its freedom from the predictable and decorous. Genet describes this second, this revolutionary, language as consisting of an assault on the senses and conventions of those who, whether unconsciously or consciously, support the status quo. This language, he proclaims, must be made up of “the forbidden words, the accursed words, the words covered with blood, the unwritten words of spit and sperm . . . the dangerous words, the padlocked words, the words that do not belong to the dictionary, for if they were written there, written out and not maimed by ellipses, they would utter too fast the suffocating misery of a solitude that is not accepted.” Jean Genet’s “Introduction” in George Jackson, Soledad Brother, Bantam Books, New York, 1970, p. 5)

          No one who wants to empower the unempowered or bring to light the unseen or articulate the liberating rage that lies buried beneath conformity’s protocols can afford to ignore Genet’s analysis. Such a hunger to triumph over the conventional, such a digging-deep in search of a language that adequately describes the reality we inhabit, is precisely what too many in the progressive movement have turned their backs on.

           And so we end up in Fallujah. Or at least talking about it. But does any of our talk make sense? In fact, is it even possible to make sense when talking about the senseless? We are a country, after all, that is fighting a humanitarian war to free a foreign population from tyranny and, in doing this, we have adopted the tactic of methodically destroying Fallujah’s ambulances as a way of teaching people that the absence of mercy is indispensable to the building of democracy.

          This is an interesting twist on helping people win their inalienable rights.

           Anyone waiting for John Kerry or John Edwards to say something incisive about the U.S. assault on Fallujah or to lead a movement against the war in general or to tattoo “Down with the government!” on their foreheads is probably also expecting the San Francisco 49ers to overcome their 1-8 record and win the superbowl. This is where the hordes of progressive leaders who helped to dismantle the antiwar movement in order to prioritize electing Kerry have delivered us: into a state of inaction and demoralization precisely when the rest of the world needs a dynamic U.S. opposition the most. Meanwhile, the wreckage in Fallujah is so astounding that U.S. soldiers resort to near apocalyptic language to describe it. As Sgt. Todd Bowers, a marine, told the AP, “It’s incredible, the destruction, it’s overwhelming.” (Edward Harris, “Marines in Fallujah Shift Focus from Battle to Reconstruction,” Army Times, 11/16/2004)

          The accuracy of this description is born out by myriads of other reports, including that of an AP photographer who, trapped inside Fallujah, tried to escape the city. As he did so, he encountered a frenzy of heavy artillery and sniper fire that included the random murder of civilians. Hoping to flee by swimming across the Tigris, he changed his mind “after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river.” One group of people whom he saw murdered was a family of five.

          Besides ground troops and snipers, the U.S.-led effort to cleanse Fallujah of insurgents includes 70-ton Abrams tanks with 120 mm guns, 2,000-pound warheads, AC-130 gunships, F-16s and so on. The result: a razed city of rubble and rotting corpses.

           Yet, according to U.S. news reports, there’s hope in the midst of the chaos, humanitarianism in the midst of mass death. As one article suggests, precision bombing allows U.S. sky jockeys to reduce targeted buildings to rubble while “nearby structures, separated by only a low wall and a few feet of grass, stand untouched.” The implication: we only take out the bad guys. If, however, we do kill innocents, it’s really their own fault anyway, as no less an authority than Defense Secretary Rumsfeld told the world on Nov. 8 at a press conference about Fallujah. “Innocent civilians,” he pontificated, “have all the guidance they need as to how they can avoid getting into trouble.” In other words, if they happen to get maimed or killed, the onus is on them, not the bomb-droppers, mortar launchers or snipers. We should all remember to tell this to Mohammed Abboud, the Iraqi father who, trapped by heavy gunfire inside his house, was forced to watch his 9-year-old son bleed to death from a shrapnel wound in the stomach. Later, still afraid to leave because of the onslaught in the streets, Abboud snuck into the family garden and buried the boy there, as if the body was a nightmare seed destined to give birth to a “free” future in which Jerry Springer will air an “I Love Democratic Iraq” special during which he interviews Fallujah’s mullahs, badgering them to confess their secret lust for white women with pierced clits.

          With the same sense of logic that allowed the UAW International to describe a contract that permitted the loss of 30,000 jobs as providing workers with “unprecedented job security,” the Pentagon announced at the beginning of Operation Phantom Fury that the best way to prevent unnecessary confusion during the assault on Fallujah was to take over and shut down, at the invasion’s outset, the city’s largest hospital. A hospital? Of course. As the New York Times reported, “The hospital was selected as an early target because the American military believed that it was the source of rumors about heavy casualties.” Translation: all those doctors and nurses leaking information about the dead and wounded wasn’t good for the U.S.’s liberating army image. And so as the battle wore on, bodies decaying in the streets and wounded civilians dying unnecessarily because of the lack of a medical presence in Fallujah weren’t really signs of U.S. brutality but were rather indications of how clever the U.S. was in thwarting enemy propaganda. Denied access to the city’s biggest hospital, and isolated from independent relief agencies like the Red Cross as the result of the military’s refusal to let them into the city, the dead couldn’t be counted and the wounded couldn’t be interviewed, thereby insuring Operation Phantom Fury’s triumph over potential enemy propaganda. In this way, the U.S.-led forces managed the international media’s access to the local carnage. Meanwhile, in the midst of Fallujah’s rubble lie, among Operation Phantom Fury’s other casualties, a question that the U.S. news media refuses to ask and which Bush and Kerry are mutually passionate about not raising. The question is this: Is the U.S. committing war crimes in Fallujah and is the whole war against Iraq in fact a war crime?

          This question isn’t asked rhetorically, but with great seriousness. According to Article 6-a of the Nuremberg Charter “initiation or waging of a war of aggression” is an international crime. Now that the facts are known, it is clear that Operation Iraqi Freedom indeed entailed the launching of a preemptive strike against a sovereign nation for no better reason than our hunch that they would like to harm us if they could. As the evidence now shows, however, Iraq did not possess the weaponry to do this, no imminent attack was planned by the Iraqi authorities, and the nation didn’t even possess the necessary infrastructural coherence to organize a future attack. Therefore, all the pre-war talk about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s links to al-Qaeda have turned out to be without merit. Given these facts, the U.S. invasion of Iraq falls into the criminal area defined by Article 6’s prohibition against “initiation or waging of a war of aggression” in the absence of internationally acceptable reasons for doing so.

          The Nuremberg Charter doesn’t stand alone in creating a framework to help us distinguish between wars of aggression and justifiable preemptive wars. For instance, although Article 51 of the UN Charter insists that nothing within the Charter should be interpreted in such a way as to “impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations,” the Charter is equally insistent, in Article 2, that member states are obligated to “settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.” Clearly, a nation that invades another nation without having been attacked first and without possessing evidence of a scheduled attack is a nation in violation (again to quote Article 2 of the UN Charter) of the prohibition against “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”

          As unsettling as these UN and Nuremberg criteria for what constitutes an illegal war are for U.S. citizens whose nation is currently involved in such a war, equally unnerving is the Nuremberg Charter’s definition of individual war crimes. According to the Charter’s Article 6-b, one such crime is the “wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages.” Every time another Fallujah building is reduced to rubble, or another Fallujah civilian dies because of the absence of medical assistance, the U.S. is guilty of the crime of wanton destruction. No matter how often Defense Secretary Rumsfeld promises us that during the Fallujah assault “there aren't going to be large numbers of civilians killed and certainly not by US forces,” the question that thunders in everyone’s ears but is never aggressively asked by the media is: “In a city where the guerrillas are dressed like the local population, and which the U.S. government has pronounced off-limited to humanitarian agencies like the International Red Cross, how can Rumsfeld or our troops have any idea who the killed and wounded are among all those bombed buildings, fallen power lines, broken glass, burnt cars and human body parts?”

          As depressing as such wreckage is, it isn’t the sole depressing wreckage we must deal with.

          We must also, here in the United States, confront the wreckage of our recent dreams and strategies for effectively opposing this war.

          We have not been radical enough. We have not been insistent enough in our attempts to break free from our desire to have it both ways – i.e., to be (a) sufficiently strong and militant to stop the war and (b) well-behaved enough in our resistance to the war so that no one accuses us of being malcontents or disbelievers in the American way or al-Qaeda supporters or whatever.

          Being well-behaved and playing it safe led us to John Kerry.

          Now we have Fallujah, and John Kerry and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership are nowhere to be seen.

          We need an independent movement not bound to either of the two main political parties. The time has come.

          In 1941 during another war, the U.S. poet and novelist Kenneth Patchen wrote in his novel Journal Of Albion Moonlight about the violent nature of the struggle to transform conditioned consciousness into a reality-comprehending consciousness. Part of the battle against war and those who promote war, he insisted, is the battle against ourselves, against the limitedness of our own thinking, against our fear of being truly free.

          “They have ordered that we all become murderers. Very well, I answer, be witness to my kind of destruction. How simple to kill a man’s body! I choose to kill his soul . . . the fact that I wish to put a purer soul in its place does not alter the fact of murder. The State has given the command to destroy: I wish to be a good citizen.”

          We must rise to the occasion.

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Fort Gordon, Georgia, 1967

-- Published in Berkeley Poets Cooperative --

In his spare time

the First Sergeant talks about Corvettes.

He likes bodies

low‑slung, with just the right

amount of chrome.

His pals call him

“Mr. Brutal”

because of what he did one night

years ago

out drinking

to one of the locals

in Seoul, Korea.

Out on maneuvers; night. This hayseed

from Iowa keeps whining he wants reefer.

Bronski says that for a cocksuck

he’ll tell him the name of a guy

from Augusta who should be some help.

The hayseed

squat square build

strong arms

freaks out, shouting at Bronski to shut his mouth

about that blowjob shit, which he finds

sickening.

Soon, though, it’s all forgotten, us bellycrawling

under barbed wire, dodging bullets.

Later we whisper flowery names like Lao Cay, and imagine

how it will feel:

the water of rice paddies rinsing our ankles.

One night in the barracks, Brown jokes about how there’d been an old

great‑grandfather type in his family, way back, a guy

who’d stoked fires on a B&O locomotive

as it steamed through a tunnel, heading

north, south, east, west.

According to family legend, he’d been

an ornery bastard, a crackpot.

About 6 months before he died, he read something in the papers about Apaches cooped up on a reservation near San Carlos:

it struck his fancy and he kept saying he wanted

to send Geronimo a note, offering

his services.

Once he even tried to leave the house, mumbling

about freedom, distant canyons, riding

a horse at night.

But his daughter’s husband pulled him

back in and made him shut up.

Galeotti had a dream ‑‑

his hands meatscraps bleeding inside

a tall refrigerator that stood on the shore

of either

a river or ocean.

It snowed so heavily, he said, that soon

the whole dream became a white blur

with barely audible voices calling

from somewhere far off.

All this occurred, he emphasized,

in another country.

They ship you out.

By now, you’ve already learned

to swig it on the sneak:

whatever kind of fuel it is

what keeps you going.

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Night in El Salvador

-- Published in Black Bear Review --

Urinals

silent in the public buildings.

An empty street winds past

a park with a broken statue in it.

It’s 8 at night and mommy whispers to the children,

“Don’t even blink!”

Only the moon’s allowed to move

and then only

if the generals approve.

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Untitled

-- Published in Black Bear Review --

Mid-March, and the snow has melted, except
for a pile on the mulberry’s shaded side, across the road
from the Atlas Point gate, through which Eddie’s wife Martha
limps in her baggy workpants and Blue Rocks parka,
me trudging behind, then I’m there,
jacket off, sleeves rolled up to the elbows,
wandering among vats filled with chemicals,
an enigmatic poetry of sorts, cooking
in obscurity, as its creators wanted it to.
Even at night, asleep, I see the vats
towering above those in charge of checking
pressure gauges and other signs of what might happen.
One day follows another, and every breath,
like a bookie’s marker, is an expenditure the locals can’t afford;
meanwhile, Theo punches the drunk guitarist in Lester’s Lounge
while, half a continent away, Sherry
falls in love with a guy who knows about Tibetan oboes.
In the mulberry’s shade, a shrinking snow patch
and at the bottom of the Point slope
a river that won’t outlive us, unless it beats the odds.

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Osip

-- Published in Abalone Moon --

A fist strikes the door. Or is it the thud
the heart makes when fresh snow's glimpsed
at one a.m. on a poplar branch?

"It's for him," the wife said knowingly. The distant Urals'
silence spread like an implication. A ghost horse
dragged his dead mother's piano to the river.

He knew things. This, for instance: the hog mind's lyrical stillness
as the animal eats trough slop. "Sad but beautiful," he thought.
Men in overcoats searched the apartment, took him. Brodsky watched.

Released months later, dying's science eluded him. Rats in a tenement,
the years hunted dozing infants' skulls. His heart, a Jerusalem
aflame in a snowstorm. Outside, the ragged scurried in alleys.

Arrested again in three years, he waited, thin
and unrecognizable, in the transit camp. Too ill
to talk straight, he spat blood not words.

Having found the right vocabulary, he didn't
live to use it. The arctic whiteness would have triumphed
anyway. In Kolyma district, a snow of bones. Ice's ideal clarity.

Note: Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), Russian poet imprisoned by Stalin.
Died in transit on the way to a labor camp in northeastern Siberia.

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Now

-- Published in Abalone Moon --

His hand's cupped on his shirtfront as if still trying
to scoop the innards back into
the belly hole. But the truth, once
out, isn't shoved easily into its box again.
Flies buzz around the body. The stink
from his shit-fouled fatigues makes us back up. Dogtags
dangle, medallions on the neck
of nonexistence, above a gully. Further off, the paddies'
senseless green stretches toward the horizon
in the eyes of the Buddhist monk walking toward us.
The dead corporal's belly hole, dark
as a myna bird on a branch. The words
the bird learns to say are nothing we haven't
heard before: the endless yakking
of dumb or desperate men. Artillery
thunders a half klick away and the ground
shakes. Someone runs like a wide
receiver faking out the safety. With one
shot Schmidt takes out the monk. I can see,
beyond where the hen disappears into tall grass,
Bonnie punching in at the transistor plant
on Rt. 110 back home. Later, one after the other,
we set huts on fire.
Finally, only
a sniper's bullet or a tripwire away,
tranquility's within reach.

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Spirit Force

-- Published in Abalone Moon --

White fairytale steeple. A town where the wheat
speaks in tongues. In the middle of the night
the Angus cattle grow restless. You wake up, moonlight
sticky on the sheets, remembering your last glimpse
of Mary Elders' thigh. That was how he told it, adding,
"Even now, the thought makes me want to grab my cock."
A pacifist, he quit the Big Ten, became a medic.
He had a way with words:
"Life's incubator" for the Perfume River
and "divinity's seat" for the lotus on the pond.
Maybe we didn't know what
he was talking about, but his fullback build
and the tongue-flicking cobra tattooed on his arm
told us don't mock him or else. In the midst
of a firefight, afraid of nothing, he'd stand straight up and stomp
through elephant grass or a bamboo thicket
with only one thing on his mind: pumping
morphine's hints of holiness into one more bod.
"The Lord in the whirlwind
blows His trumpet loud and clear!" he'd prophecy, guiding
a grunt's woozy mind toward The End or resurrection.
"He gives me the creeps. I feel like Jesus is stalking me
through the jungle," Alverez complained.
No one knew what to make of him. Sometimes
men on R&R reported seeing him standing next to a Saigon street vendor
devouring piles of rice pancakes
and noodle fish soup. And one night
in the B45 Bar on Tu Do St. I watched him disappear
with three different whores, one at a time, in about an hour.
"I'm weak but I'm still the Redeemer," he grinned
at Brown minutes after dragging him away
from the right leg the wounded man would never see again.
Then, not waiting for a stretcher, he lifted the hysterical grunt in his arms
and lumbered toward the medevac site while hollering
above the mortars' thunder something in a language no one could understand.

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Excursion

-- Published in Abalone Moon --

I scoop up a few stones, shake my hand
and rattle them like dice
in this wooded place where the stream, already having dwindled
to almost nothing a mile back,
concludes for real.

Over there's a tulip poplar,
one branch reaching, while it grows
thinner inch after inch, toward an elusiveness
neither it nor I
can grasp.

And here? This is me,
bearded, with a pizza stain on my collar.

Beyond the stream,
language, like an antisocial woodsman, folds up its tent
and goes where no tent is needed :
a clearing where what the grass has to say
is massaged by sunlight into silence.

Graying with age, I listen to dice click in absence's casino.
Elsewhere, you lie naked with another man.

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Note After Midnight

for Ahmed Dahbur*

-- Published in Abalone Moon --

In the headlights, night rain washes dirt
down the embankment into the cracked driveway.
The parked car's engine runs. The tiny
overhead lamp, on.

Behind the steering wheel, I read your words:
"I pursue a black rose growing in my heart
while the evidence overwhelms me."

Yes, the evidence. The rain beats the car's roof.
Like a refugee's garbled code, the sound
sends a chill through me.

Inside your existence, your friend with a notebook disappears.
Somehow, thousands of miles away, he kisses the back
of my hand, leaving his bloody lip prints there.
Children with explosives tied to their bellies
blow up in our mouths months later when we talk.

In the rained on car, I look at my hands.
They glow like open furnaces.
Among the coals, I see teeth and bones.

In my dreams nothing stolen is returned.
Not one grape to one vine.
Not the robbed sound of feet fleeing death in Fakhani and the camps.
Not the smell of stewed vegetables or the home
in which they were cooked years ago before the dislocation.

*Ahmed Dahbur (1946-), Palestinian poet. As a child his family fled
war-torn Haifa to live in Lebanon.

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Unignorable Measure

-- Published in Abalone Moon --

Cargo elephant on noon airport road into Mumbai,
an old thought on the verge of extinction.
Huge ungainly hips beat car fumes and light
into a lather in which the eyes' choked birds die in midair.
As if alone on a jungle path, the elephant's rider
hears the sound of teak trees growing.
Closer, slums stretch for miles.
In scum-ponds stinking of human feces, a new bacteria
breeds, a poetry of reinvention, fouling
everything and filling with open sores
the mouths of those who chant holy words near cremation pyres.
Out of all this, the thin man on the elephant's back
rides forth, controlling the animal in the midst of a noon traffic jam, coughing
in spasms and spitting up
wads of phlegm that hit the road
with a metrical cadence too improvisational for those consoled by how, behind
the Brass Rail Tavern back home, the ex-high school football hero
fucks who he wants, promising there will be no
unpredictable tomorrows.

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Reception

for Savita and Berthan

-- Published in Abalone Moon --

Two goats. And Laxshman who holds
my one-year-old grandson. I follow them.
The path leads through underbrush
to another path. Bearing right leads
to huts silhouetted against a dusk sky.
I once lived here. Now I don't. Who
is the refugee and who isn't and what,
if anything, does the Red Cross worker know
about those who can't hear the flowers' covert tamboras
because of the hospitals in their ears?
Yesterday my niece was married. And tonight,
behind me, the old pump factory compound's lit up
like a heart electrified by an excess of knowledge.
Laxshman ties the goats to a post. Here, a figure
inside a dark doorway, shoes off, a
child in his arms. Me. And Laxshman's mother
offering a stool to sit on. I say, "I can only
stay a minute." What the village knows is what
everything knows: actual dirt paths, described
in the mind or on
a hard drive or written page, aren't themselves the paths
that crisscross a hillside east of Gasneshpur Rd.
Still, I'm here. Somewhere. Back
to the compound now. The newlyweds
already there. Amidst the fertile presence
of the absence of drill presses and lathes, people gather
as they do everywhere, wanting to believe
that tomorrow, if it exists, is worth it and that
far away a quiet camel trail emerges from
the homemade rocket launcher while in the mosque
the prayer rug unfolds as the shooting fades and the only
artillery is the rose's redness along the ancient river.
Here is a hut. And here a gathering. And here
a grandson sleeps in a room.

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Winter Note to Adriana

-- Published in Abalone Moon --

Which twig is it, shooting from which other twig
on what branch? There must be
one that centers the whole picture for us, but I
can't find it. Only
a random burst is there, of this twig and that twig
and this branch and that, a chaos
of offshoots jutting at odd angles
like thoughts in a mind that meditates
on everything at once. Completely
beyond logic, the tree exists. That its wildness
panics us, making us want to see it
as more orderly than it is, is gratuitous. If children
wake or don't wake from nightmares now
makes no difference. The moon is out
somewhere else, although here it's late morning.
The January light
is ice today. It creaks. Beneath it
the mighty river pours. Beyond us.

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The Locust's Vocabularies

A Sequence

-- Published in MiPo --

1. I See It

across her white hair
and through the window:
a rain like we haven’t
had for months, pounding

the street while the wind
blows a paper scrap
into the air and water splashes
down from the blocked gutter above

the kitchen window. The TV
newscaster speaks
solemnly as behind him many
people turn

to the desert south
of Najaf, watching for the itinerant to come, his eyes
burning darkly like the hornet’s black markings
as he trudges forward, promising sweetmeats
even to the viper and holding

a soda can in each hand. Here
rain and there
smoke rises from

night streets. Down
an alley where the stewed chickpeas’ smell
thickens, thoughts
explode in people’s skulls and bits
of bone fly like shrapnel everywhere.
Much closer, rain batters car hoods while she
unties her white hair and shakes

her head, hair brushing
frail shoulders
more gently than one would think
possible now.

2. To Yasin Taha Hafiz

Like you, I saw her. She stood
on Kafah St. near the Fadl Mosque
not far from where the dates-seller
whispered something into
the imam’s ear. Only when she crossed

to the other side in her black coat
did I see shadows, like those cast
by ancient Babylon’s hanging gardens, under
her eyes and hear her knees creak
as she limped through a swarm

of whining flies. Maybe
in her lineage, millennia ago, a temple slave
wandered this very street, hunting
for incense to burn
so the dead rats’ stench in the cloister

wouldn’t make her puke. Today, seeing
this woman whose face
is a prophetic mural on a wall
of skin, I wanted
to tell her something but when our eyes met
she gazed at me contemptuously, as if
it was a sin to peer without permission
into Mesopotamia’s last ziggurat, her heart. You

were born here and yet she once shunned
you too and withdrew. But it’s worse now. With
bombs falling all around, she stands
motionless, stillness the only

vocabulary that counts: each vowel,
the desert growing hotter at midday; each consonant,
a once triumphant empire, dead.

3. Intersecting Angles

The joke made her sob and as she sobbed she knocked
the gin fizz off the table onto the carpet, attracting
the other guests’ attention. What,
Tom Brokaw wanted to know,
would the next move be? The camera panned
across desert sand while she screamed
at her husband, “You keep changing the reasons
you hate me! I can’t stand it!” On
her hands and knees now, she tried
to wipe up the spilled drink with
her handkerchief. Soldiers in a jeep
drove above her head toward a place she’d never visit. Her husband,
trying to ignore her, pointed
at the anchor and remarked to Glen, his friend,
“It’s impossible to tell what’ll happen next.”
People milled around and eyed each other, growing
mellower by the minute until nothing, certainly
not the weeping wife,
was left. The screen, a pictureless
deep blue now, was pretty. If anyone was there
they would have stared
at it, at least momentarily. Hours later
rainy daylight rinsed
the Bridgeport house’s windows
on a street that skirted,
a substanceless idea, past
whatever hope of meaning
once existed there. In the meantime, in the desert
south of An-Najaf, soldiers closed their eyes
against a sandstorm as it blew
beyond what they thought was real while far
to the north Jonah, whom
some of them believed once lived
in the belly of a whale, still railed
against Nineveh, telling it: repent in 40 days or else
God’s angelic hordes will slaughter you.

4. The Distraction

“It’s like Siegfried, the old
Nordic hero,” he said about
the daffodil, confusing me.
“Look how lovely and light
it is,” he smiled.
It was 1952 or ‘53
and Uncle Hal and I had just stopped tossing
the baseball back and forth
behind the Yonkers apartment building where tonight
years later
people crowd into small rooms and stare
at firefights in Basra.
One afternoon he told me, while cousin Alfred
practiced the tuba on the fire escape,
about his father’s house in a pine forest
outside Munich not far from the Isar river:
“It was built long ago with rocks
quarried by men from whose scraped knuckles oozed
the blood that now runs in our veins.”
According to my mother
years earlier in 1946 Uncle Hal bought a fake press card
so he could hang out at crime sites and stand next
to firemen when buildings burned.
He knew everything there was to know about Mickey Mantle
and showed me Korea on the map
and made me do pushups
naked in my room when he thought I wasn't obedient enough.

5. Response

“Do you wish to destroy?”
– S.S.

No, not the gray zone between
one number and the next
or the unexpected secrets
that bring God to his knees . . .

You’re in a room
Its north wall: the line where Arizona
ends and begins.
Behind you, the televised building in flames
both is and isn’t real.
Focused, you hear
the abandoned cliff dwellings’ silence further south.

Far away, near a coast,
I look out the window.
In the March rain a bead of water forms
on a twig tip.

The senses converge on the seen
like the planet compacting
carbon into diamond. At night
what thief cuts messages in the mind’s glass eye with it?

Centuries ago, when the Prophet’s cousin was slain, Babylon
was already gone.
And now . . .

Me, a destroyer? Don’t make me laugh.
I leave the rain alone
and obey the maple’s dictates.

If you drown in the torrent
or the tree falls on you
or the incinerated building’s sparks ignite your hair,
don’t blame me.
A writer maimed days ago by what I spied
on the road to Najaf, the home
of Ali’s tomb,
I don’t create creation, I’m enslaved by it.

6. Thirty Years Ago Today
for Leah Cutillo, 1897-1973

Rain washes the last snow
from beyond the cesspool slab.
Wool cap on, she slops through mud
toward where a month from now poppies will sprout.
Late afternoon and the temperature’s
just above freezing. Already

the rain’s turning to sleet.
The veins harden also, after
a lifetime of shots. And in the dry eyes

something like sand scrapes to and fro.
Trudging, she returns, not knowing
how in twelve days her headache

will grow horrid and then that night she’ll die
long before one poppy blossoms.
The brain tumor, like

a smart bomb with precise controls, takes her life
at that exact second when
God wants her gone. Like a city

decades later under siege, no part
of her body suffers unnecessary harm. Only
brain and heart are destroyed. The rest is left

intact, to rot freely, according to decay’s
sundry possibilities, without interference from those
who might want her to rot a different way.

7. Dawn Voice

Gradually the fading moonlight’s
replaced by daylight, although the mind can’t be sure
exactly when

the change happens, or if
the cupola, a different blue
from the sky, is
a better blue or why
the dogs bark even before

the muezzin’s call, a sound
that rouses feelings no outsider
can understand, just as
when the wind blows, flinging sand grains
at the camel’s head, only those

of us who years ago were born here
so we could rise from sleep today
will know what being here now is like and how
it feels to realize
our deaths are televised between what you need

to know about the electric drill you want
and the pretty daffodils
pictured on the box of tampons no woman can live without.

8. Mixture
for Suman

“You bring it into the world with you.”
-- Ray Charles

There she was, on her ass on the sidewalk
in late-March sunlight while four cops
stood over her on H St., or thought

they did, as somewhere else she saw
the rice paddies east of the Ganpati temple
near Hindalga in Karnataka. One
cop mocked, “That was a nifty

Oscar performance, lady”
while another looked uncomfortably
away, toward a minuscule patch
of city grass where a crocus would pop up

any day now. Other officers

in perfect formation paraded toward
the crowd, pushing it back
like a bulldozer shoving the undefined debris
into a ditch of unexpected meanings. Her daughter

and her daughter’s baby, both safe
behind her, were part
but not all of why she stood up now and yelled
at the heckler, “No, you’re

the one who gets the Oscar
for pretending to have balls!” So much
erupted then: British laughter, a Muslim infant

skewered by a Hindu sword in Kanpur in’47, the scent
of pickled mangos in an open jar and the sight
of jute coils piled up in the bazaar. From there

to now, youth
to this: the bitter
and the almost-sweet. She glimpsed

a few known faces, heard an Ethiopian stranger
whisper something pleasant in her ear, then
walked forward, not sure where she was but certain
that at the end of every billy club on the street
Baghdad burned. Smoke

rose everywhere. Even
the pigeons couldn’t breathe.

9. A Poetics of the Usual

“Nice to see something not about the war.”
-- R. E. J.

Under the Iraqi date palm, replace
the rocket launcher with
a billboard publicizing Oman’s beachfront forts. Or maybe
something more local should be touted: “Visit

the plain where King Nebuchadnezzar
ate wild grasses and went insane.” The bridge
from one thing to another: always
just around the corner. Here

for instance. The child’s chubby face. It’s burned. Outside
the hospital, screaming in her mother’s arms, she is
the epitome of lyrical, improvising
sounds, reinventing
music’s fundamentals. And look: the right cheek's

blistered skin, lighter than a piece of wet cellophane
stuck to a fence post at an industrial dump, peels off
more easily than falsehood
from a newscaster’s truth. Don’t
worry, though: if you’re still

tired of it all, we’ll fix your boredom yet. After
removing the kid’s hooded sweater and other garb, rub her
with ancient Babylon’s aromatic oils, then
when her screaming fades a bit

spread her legs and play
with her clit, so tiny and shy
and seductively demilitarized. It’s a tossup then
what she’ll remember best in the years ahead: the bomb

that maimed her face or how, entering
her body, you cleaved it till it quaked. War
or no war, read about it or don’t,
true lyricism starts
when the pain’s so bad the mind falls apart.

10. Message from the Man near Synak Bridge

C’mon. Over here. Don’t mind the bluebird
sitting on the branch above Omar’s
charred innuendoes on the stone walk
near where the house once was.

Look, there,
at the Rose of Sharon.

And here. Wind blows dust across the vacant veranda.
Hope never dies. From the rubble it’s still possible
to build a kingdom of lies.

Local poets flee the city.
Unknown ones arrive, bringing
the haunting lyricism
of the locust’s vocabularies.

11. I Marched with the Dead

Some wore colorful bandannas and beat
drums with their hands. A woman
with shaved head walked in front of me. At the juncture
where skull met neck, a tattooed eye
with a black bear reflected in its retina
stared at everyone. I tapped her shoulder, queried, “Who”
drew that great tattoo?” But
her answer was drowned out by people rhyming
while far away fish climbed Amazonian trees.

I looked around at known
and unknown. Darkening the hair of those near me
smoke blew here and there. Pictures of little girls
smiling idiotically were held
high above the crowd. Making odd sounds
a distant city’s minarets disintegrated, eaten
by the moon’s gluttonous light on a night
of revelry in mid afternoon. Closer
to home, we clamored at people’s windows, begging for a chance
to hacksaw open their chests and rescue their hearts’ defanged piranhas.

On the sidewalk, a marcher saw a dead pigeon. Inside
its beak, oil bubbled up
from a crack in desert rock while blackshirted men and women, wearing
cloth masks, danced in front of a pawnshop window.
“We don’t want . . !” the mob roared
as we kept marching, uselessly, like yesterday and the day before.
In the concert hall he carried with him, the pianist glimpsed
enemy mortars flaring under the cellist’s fingernails.

The unheard march. They, the living dead.
Once Rivka from Yonkers' Warburton Ave. sprinted
from the wire factory, then jumped into the river, gone forever.
Here, today, a chanter with honeyed tongue races the length
of his final sentence, then drowns in the silence at the end.

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Already

-- Published in MiPo --

It was there, under her lids
a ransacked home, a broken menorah
on the floor. The grandpa, a violin bow
on his lap, sat against the wall
in the corner. Every night her eyes,
mice scurrying in and out of holes, watch
the ambiguous harden into fact. Returning
in the mornings, she steps out
from under eyelids and talks:
"Frau Joblanski, she told Tante Hannah
about a neighbor named Naomi
who always listened to the radio.”
When Naomi disappeared, something else did too.
Like a chemical froth on the Vistula's bank,
what Joblanski knew dirtied what it touched.
More majestic than silence, the eerie’s shadow
smoked a cigarette behind an old café.
It wasn’t winter then. Nor is it now. Already
the tulips are out, petals
gray with ash.
Does this mean
anything to you?

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Presence

-- Published in MiPo --

Smell of burnt cricket torsos everywhere.
The moon didn’t do it.
It was something else. An animal
that leaves charred things behind
when it disappears.

Yellow eyes near the tulip poplar.
The moon vanishes behind clouds.
The unknown moves. An October
breeze or something like it, love,
departs on small paws.

The animal stops, arches its back, and listens
to a distant twig crack. Its fur,
a soft burnt-sienna fire, brushes a fern leaf,
turns its edge black. This is where
night starts.

Love is either gone or not. This is definite, though:
the old box dug up behind the woodpile.
In it: a tiny skeleton, blue rattle, and pacifier.
An animal, the one with the fire-body, howls.
I dance, shake the rattle.

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Busted Cherry

-- Published in MiPo --

We cowboy in, bodies alert, every
nuance sensed, each fact grasped:
the light’s gradations through banyan branches,
the rock at a vegetable patch’s edge.
A strip of bloody gauze, thicker
than truth, lies on the dusty road.
I step around an empty ammo box.

Little Larry inches toward a wooden
cart toppled in a trench. Nothing
behind it, he continues on.

Over there, motion. I turn and, in a movement
perfect enough
for a photographer to record, open fire.
The village’s last sniper slumps over near the well.
In the distance, a hill path
in heat haze.
Have I come of age?
Am I a man?

The leech bites on my ankle
from the swamp we trudged through yesterday
still itch.

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One of the Many Ways It Goes Down

-- Published in MiPo --

Khanh knows that far away her GI listens as James Brown wails
in his skull. She slips out
of her miniskirt. Through the window
neon flashes on-off, on-off, and suddenly, while getting
into bed, her thighs
spread open beyond the walls’ cohesion
as he moves toward her, duckwalking
in sumptuous daylight through
tall grass, and just when
he finds his way back to cunt and tits
he steps on the tripwire and her daydream
ends, body parts flying in all directions.
“Doesn’t you love me no more?” Khanh weeps
when she hears the explosion, then scavenges
on the ground for a remnant big enough to grab. These
flesh pieces, her baby’s daddy, are
the crazy order Khanh fondles in her sleep.
Once again, then again, he takes
a step, senses something strange, and . . .
She wakes up, wondering
“What time is it? What day?”
“Huh?” her old aunt asks.
Smell of fish stew, monk on fire, motor scooter
riders racing in and out
of traffic, music blaring, the Dhammapada says:
“You are a withered leaf in departure’s doorway.”
Lightheaded, Khanh holds on
to the bed, afraid to get out.

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With You

-- Published in Nimrod --

Day after day, snow on the old

rotting roofs doesn’t go away;

neither does creek ice or the stiff

axle grease no one knows how to loosen.

Like love, or obsession, roof snow

in subzero weather goes nowhere, a crust

covering worlds below.

Allah is the cold; his prophet, the ice

forming in keyholes and the nostrils of mice.

You talk, elbows on table.

Snow on roofs reflects afternoon sunlight

the way a pianist’s teeth might,

while, under treebark,

in yard after yard, Allah’s silence

swells, more complex than sound is.

The thin line between is and isn’t

separates your words as I listen

and Ramadan fades, almost over.

Veiled or unveiled, you are here but hidden:

on the nape of your neck, obscurity’s delicate down;

your momentary quiet, the dead of winter in a snail shell;

who you are, your inner physics, is written over there,

frost crystals on the window;

and here, this is your collarbone, and this

the place where your earlobe descends

into the enigmas it beckons.

I’m here.

Black coffee in a cup,

the smell of pine in the corner.

Allah’s syllables expire

when your hand’s shadow

roams across the table,

a caravan from Mecca heading toward

Istanbul’s loud bazaars

and pleasures I barely remember.

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Hotel La Caravelle, Martinique

-- published in Red Booth Review --

1
A terrace outside the room. Weeds
grow through cracked concrete, a bottle
of warm beer stands on the broken table.
To the side, the orchid darkens as the sun
splashes down in flames, steam rising
from the heads of boiled fish, cockeyed
in the pot we all live in.
One knapsack and a few books
I never wrote, this is what I own.
A few hours ago, Miguel, the clerk, accepting
my gold chain and earring, said
“Tomorrow morning at seven. Out.”

2
In the monkey’s shadow where the gecko
scoots between two stones then disappears
only to reappear two minutes later
crawling upside down on the bathroom ceiling,
that’s when I first notice it, how
I can’t keep up with what’s going on,
the monkey gone before I know it and then, later
when I glance at the bathroom ceiling, the gecko
isn’t there either and neither anywhere
in these rooms are you, legs spread someplace else
as always, fucking another man
in Puerto Rico, or this time is it Arizona?

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Meeting

-- Published in Red Booth Review --

The mind made up of other minds, all of them
humming near the fragrances they want

My body is the sunlight beating little wings
above the nude you’s every inch

Look at them over there, the bees
swarming the coneflowers

On the ground, fecund with sweat
in my arms, you are the hot grass opening up
into the bright darkness of openings still unknown

Much later you smell of the rosewood soap
I wash you with, although

in an affair like this
we never can get clean, unless,

in spite of everything,
we do

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Dear Anna

-- Published in Stirring --

Today, watching a soldier nail a live hawk to a fence post by its wings,
I thought of you, how you stood in line outside the prison,
wanting to see your son.
Every face in the January cold had gums that bled
and skin creases deep enough to hold
the iced-over Neva's broken vodka bottles.
And yet, as always, there was that about you.
To gently remove the white scarf from your head,
to see the mist pulling back from the meadow by the woods,
even now this is what I want to do, as my free hand,
a caravan with one oasis on its mind,
migrates up your thigh between your legs.
Even aging, Anna, you were the woman I loved most --
"The last great passion of my life," I told you once.
And yet now I must confess that what you wrote me
years ago is true, "All promises are broken soon enough."
It's because you hailed from a mesmerizing town of riddles
that I was a non-riddle to you, easily figured out;
you laughed, composing more poems with one yawn in your easy chair
than I could write in a year while hunched over my desk.
Yet sometimes, Anna, I now forget
your black hair when you were young, and your face,
which, as beautiful as it was so long ago,
was more than just a face:
like the era itself, it was frightened by how it moaned
as mobs, sobbing lamentations, trudged through snow-piled streets
while you wrote funeral music for every living thing, even rats.
What beauty, so regal yet so pained.
And yet you, whom I never can forget, I now forget
for hours at a stretch, as another woman writes to me
"I get so wild for you, like an animal."
I find such words embarrassing, Anna, I'm too old;
like a fisherman's wooden bucket lost in the Baltic Sea,
my body softens, pieces of it rot and loosen,
and that's only the beginning;
given this, how can any woman talk sexually to me and be sincere?
At your gravesite, Anna, the last snow has melted
as has every promise I ever made.
I hate spring -- it's so passionate and youthful.
You once lived in a gloomy house on the Neva's bank.
You knew Count Zubov there.
I don't care about these things. I want to think of her.
More skilled than your first gravediggers, this woman's
burying you too deep to locate.
I love her, Anna, yet your absence
is the Siberia in which I'm fated to pass away --
but I can't.
To dream of her, I must live.

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For C.C. and Mr. Shaman

in memoriam, Mikhail "Mickey" Bykov (1924-2000)

-- Published in Stirring --

1
From the pigeon's split stomach, the rat's snout
rises cutely.
As if owned by Ruby, the fortuneteller
on 4th St., the rodent, nose quivering,
dangles entrails in the dusk air, so we
can read the future as written in the love-dove's innards.
The rat, euphoric, holds part
of the Holy Ghost in its mouth.

Seeing this, Mickey laughed, "We're blessed." 1986.

2
"What kinds of fucking names are those, and why
should I give a shit, even if you have an answer?"
is what Mickey would've asked you, if he hadn't died
a few years back. A Queens bolt cutter
from out west, he hooked up one night with Eleanor.
"C'mon, stud," she told him, after which they fucked
on a Brooklyn dock. She died six years later. Pancreatic cancer.
He never held a steady job after that.

3
In the silo, I lifted feed in my palms,
then tossed it back again, closed my eyes
and listened to my handfuls slide down the feed mound
until there was

no noise. Except the blue jay
squawking in the elm. Then it stopped. Out
of this nothing, Mickey emerged from a blur and woke me up
on a Brooklyn wharf while still talking

about Nebraska. "What?" I asked. "Shut up!" he barked, then dragged me
to a craps game on Fulton St, around the corner
from a syringe in which the four horsemen galloped
through blood puddles beneath Coney Island's Ferris wheel. This

is all that matters. In loser's triumph,
I came here to celebrate the idiotic master.
When he slid the boxcar door closed, my mind shut down.
In that dark, years ago, America counted, at least
for a moment. Waking up as we approached

Omaha, I slid open the door
and a few snowflakes blew in. A strand of trees
along a road. No bird
rose from any branch.

In a field, a frozen pond. Nothing else.

4
When I stopped drinking, only Mickey liked me.
Sometimes he wrote, banging an old Remington's keys
in a hotel overlooking absence's fruition,
but mostly he just showed up, unannounced,
at a Nebraska wheatfield's edge and stood there, assimilating
immensity's gradations.
He could do this even when he wasn't there.
"I'll tell you what the fuck all this means," he said once.
"It means that even meaning doesn't know what meaning means."
He liked to talk like that.

5
I don't know who you are,
but Mickey, him I knew.
He would've liked your names.
Besides, I'm in love with things
that are closer to you than you think.
When outsiders pass through town,
pay attention.
The squirrels they feed transcend the imagination.

6
At the Buggy Tavern, everyone's transfixed
by the guitar note quaking on heaven's other side.
The chain hanging from the motorcycle jacket's shoulder
swings back and forth, the universe's pendulum.
It's a bad-ass night tonight, and when, later
on TV, a water canon's spray
blows like everything ungraspable down a Quebec boulevard
and men and women brave enough to stand up fall down,
even the disinterested peer at the screen.
Another rebellion's blood in the street, although this time
Mickey, the Korean War vet, isn't there, unlike 1989
when he showed up in D. C. and got busted for pissing
on the Pentagon. His buddies
from American Legion Post No. 606 in Brooklyn
bailed him out, although they weren't certain why.

7
A cheese steak's taste by the river.
At Gander Hill, a visit with Leon.
In the air, the seagull's belly.
This is all I need to live.

When necessary, I drive southwest to the canyon, then return
seeking shoulders that descend into melody.
A woman listens for my footsteps in the woods at night.

Sitting Bull relaxes on grasslands and falls asleep.
From among wheatfields, Mickey came,
dreaming of me, who schemes of ways to talk with you.

On a night when no mind can follow the keyboard's metaphors,
Mr. Africa, cornering me in a Philly alley, proclaimed,
"Taking our water, familiar and clean,
they turn it into a potion that's poison."
Now he's dead, killed by the police.

Here I am.
In my right palm lies a wren's egg discovered in tall grass,
in my left a Preeble mouse found shivering on a rock --
take them, friends, they are Allah's body, weeping to be loved.
Once again, the cities will grow quiet.
This morning, after waking,
I remembered Varanasi, the wild
cremation fires there.

Here, years later,
Mickey's still in flames.

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Henka

-- Published in Stirring --

Like petroleum, that dark. She remembered how
she stumbled toward it, not telling
the uncles in the Gdansk shipyard later. Soft as

an undercooked pirogue’s belly, her fat
eyelid was what she carried there, holding back

her tears. Barely able to stand the crocus’s
violent breaking of the dirt, she wasn’t made
for survival. Still, she knew how to wield
the iron frying pan if she had to, which

she did once, although the soldier whose head
she fractured was just a boy and not worth it, in spite
of having his dick out. But on this day

when she saw the Holy Mother’s black face, a Baltic Sea
in which the seal raids a net for food, and felt
death’s nearness, something
of moment was at stake. The Hussite’s saber slice
on the icon’s cheek opened up, a mountain gorge
into which no child should ever stray, and as the wind

howled inside it she knew that weeping
in front of the black face set her free. Then
it hit her: she wanted

someone like St. Luke for a lover. Transgressing
for the first time against her faith, she wondered
if he’d fucked the Holy Mother before
painting her and in this way had made

the drained peasant woman bloom. Henka never
hid after that, but created a life
out of taking risks, sometimes eating

cold cabbage rolls in the birdshriek forest
not far from where
Rosa the Jewess once met with saboteurs.

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To Federico from One of the Disappeared

-- Published in Stirring --

The sky did it. To me, companero.
The flagpole’s shadow, the python’s outstretched belly,
swelled with what youth didn’t know. You grew
your hair long but it hid nothing, least of all

you. The dead elm’s color: so like
the child’s face at dawn as the mother stared at it, sobbing.

Unaware, bugs walked toward the water
while the water walked toward the bugs.
Someone played piano.

The world was holy, almost. I once thought: should I
brand butterflies and herd them into corrals like cattle?

In the end, wearing too many faces while returning
from one of my walks by the Hudson, I tilted back my head:
the sky slashed my throat. I know, I know:

it wasn’t fair to leave you behind
to write the poetry.

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The Precipice Poems / A Sequence

for Adriana Leela and Shane Umar

-- Published in Stirring --

I. Listening to Music in Mumbai During the War

for Savita and Poornima

1
As it takes off, the egret's feet skim
across water, sound's disappearance.
The santoor player looks around.

2
In the slum's reeds, a breeze whispers.

In one of the marsh huts constructed
of cardboard and plastic:
the brush's murmur as a mother pulls it
through her small son's hair.

Hours pass. At the rice paddy's edge,
a bird sits in morning light on the water buffalo's back.
Its beak makes a faint snapping noise
as it eats insects off the buffalo's skin, thicker
than the tabla's membrane from which
the thunder's rhythm comes.

Beyond here,
a Kabul only these notes can reach.
Possibly.

A plane swoops low, melody in search
of something else's
or its own
tremolant tone.

At note's end: silence's valley. In it
Kashmiri gunmen
disappear into fog.

3
Ustad Rashid Kahn's voice:

The sound of the rice shoot's green
grows heavier than boulders behind the ancient Hampi temple. An egret feather
floats on a pond.

The bus fumes' quiet dominates
Kirloskar Rd.
near where, once on a balcony, someone
crawled in the rain.

One note, an earthquake.
Gujarat's ground cracks open.
Love's howling begins.
The mind drains
into a ravine.

4
Here, where the music is, night
improvises a moon.

A woman in burkha treads past rubble.

Love sobs in the trees.
Rashid sings.

In the fields
the egret, nowhere
to be found.

II. Sick at Pune Train Station

The harmonium player who isn't there
shivers into existence as the fever rises.
Draping a second blanket over my shoulders,
my son disappears.

At night, an afternoon of bird notes;
no train comes. I propose
to Begum Akhtar who sings ghazals
just for me.

Once, a road's bauxite-reddened dust
blew in the air as lorries roared by.
Around each bend, the wished-for whispered, "More! More!"

Where is the Kokcha river, nothing's muddy mirror?
Hassan's uncle mocks hopelessness while chasing a long-gone goat
through the village in which we once lived.
Under her burkha Mumtaz writes poems
with an eyelash on dark cloth.

"What does such poetry mean?" a newsman screamed
on the TV yesterday.
The harmonium player on the platform
tugs at my shawl on the red road.
My son, carrying me in his arms, orders
"Daddy, show them what the living know!"

Yes that's a good idea I think waking up
in a different train station. Belgaum.

Anand, balancing the sky on his back, walks
toward me shouting,
"You are here!"

III. Vengurla Late Afternoon

Each wave washes
over sand, under skin. Foam
bubbles break. Language
unborn.

Eyes closed, I cut off
my ponytail, throw it
into the wind, listen
for the sound of each hair strand
fall.

One after another
waves roll in.

The sun sets, although
I don't know when.

My son lugs baggage
from the train.

Crows shriek morning
into being.

IV. Clarity's Birth

On the breakfast table,
jasmine in a bowl.

The mind rests, a baby goat
on the hill near Ganeshpur.

Anand scrapes seeds from the sliced papaya
with a spoon.

Bougainvillea overgrows barbed wire.
A bird sings there or in the fruit.

V. Ft. Aguada

1/12/2002

I give her away but don't.
Who can give

the unowned?
"Is that a blue sari?" "No."

From the cliff, look. The sun sets
on the sea.

"What a sea!"
"Farouk sailed to Oman once."

Below on the beach,
thought, a sand crab, races

into a hole. Where
the shenai player

is, his notes
are too.

Look. Bride
and bridegroom clutch

each other -- on a precipice
high above the sea.

VI. Ft. Aguada's Ghost at Night

The battlement's stones, entrenched emotions
pounded by waves. Standing

on a wall no piano knows about, eyebrows thicker
than the sea he contemplates, he remembers
jasmine and what it means

to leave home as the midwife, crouched
in morning mist, grinds flour
near a hillside paddy from which

a white crane ascends, light
returning to itself. A Maratha warrior

trained to listen, he hears the sound
plankton makes as it drifts near rocks
where soon the barnacle

will grab it. But something more
is there, the cold spray and a ship's masts

creaking in the wind. Over the years
foreigners come and go. Only he
remains, the one

who guards silence in the spaces between
sand grains on the beach.

VII. Talking About Ghazals With Gune

Silence rhymes with itself. A breeze sifts through
the water buffalo's beard. The sea is almost blue.

A thought passed from one human to the next:
silence's harmonium creates a note just for you.

Waves pound the beach;
love tells the coast, "I'm here too."

VIII. Fragments of a Letter from the East

"I wonder what we, safely back here, look like . . . to them"
- J.P.

Not kittens playing with a dead woman's hair
on a lawn that stretches,
a mind without limits.

Not, years ago, escapees huddled
in Black Forest snow, or was it east of the Ob
in Siberia?

Not, no not, no . . .

If he is safe, an aging man and his memories
mean nothing to those who suffer now.

2
Beyond the sentimental, a morning street. Proclaiming
the existence of the real, bullets fly from under
the motorcycle rider's shawl.

Near where the milk wallah walks,
dead police lie on Chowringhee Rd.
Like nuances eluding the mind's grasp,
the assailants disappear.

Further north, the muezzin's call to prayer: a river
winding through Kashmir, fracturing valleys
and creating gorges where none were before.

3
"Did someone say something?"
No.
It was a tree frog's footfall in the Goan jungle
near the Safa masjid at Ponda's outskirts
long after dawn.

Under a cassia, one man hands another money.
It's arranged: after the wedding, the village will hold a party.
The mullah, recently sick, is thinner than he should be.

Unlike the killing, this happened weeks ago.

4
Something nameless makes an unheard noise miles away.

Oblivious, the gunman in the mountain trench
lifts his grizzled face, his eyes
a country where the infirmaries are in flame, toward me.
"Why?" I ask, frightened
of the viburnum all around.

Later on a Srinagar street
a man, his hair burning, dances with
a voluptuous whore of smoke.

Entranced by her, he doesn't
look at you.

IX. In More

The still-smoldering bus tires' stench, inhaled
by the yellow cassia flower, percolates
deeper into things than the politicians

think. Nearby, the water buffalos' field
welcomes the egret. Like the perfect merger of me and that:
a melted comb intertwines forever with

the imam's daughter's hair. Mansur glares upward
through a ceiling hole into a light that isn't there. Here

where the road bends, an inclination
curling toward what can't be seen yet, the teak tree
shades the boulder upon which

the monkey sits not far from where
someone in a hovel sings a lover's song:
"A huge moon hung, a good omen, in the sky and so . . ." What

dreams we have, what hopeful diasporas beyond the cutting
of the sugar cane. The grainsack carrier who, bent over,
plods forever in the marketplace, eying dirt the way
some people eye the sky, knows how to boil lentils

to make perfect dal. Not far from where
he lives, a bus full of burning Muslims leaves the station
every night, tires

spinning, fields stretching everywhere
in more directions than there are.

X. To Lynn, from above the Vale, Kashmir

Snow on mountain peaks; a lake blacker

than the dead boatman's eyelashes. Blood trickles
from a knuckle as a woman grubs for edibles

where there aren't any. The wind, a reminder,
howls, trapped

by the gorge's walls. When the sound
of guns stops and no explosions shake

Srinagar miles behind her, the silence
amazes, even more than, far away,

the boulders' muteness high above
Little Burro Creek. That is where you walked

yesterday without me in an Arizona
of useless disappearances, your silence there

drowned out by the chinar tree's here
in the dusk that follows

a daylight you don't know about. She
stands up, departs. I

do too. The mountains'
shadows grow longer, hope

stretched as far as it
can go.

XI. Eyes Closed

Sound's flotsam spills onto the beach;
feet sink into sand.

The almost-silence washes back
into the sea

(goodbye, parrot and jackfruit tree)

then returns.

Hello everything.

Breathe in, breathe out,
pull the sea to here, send it away to there,
in, out.

Ebb and flow.
In a week I leave again for Srinagar.
I will carry the sea in the suitcase
of my heart.

Eyes closed, moonrise still happens.
Sound's flotsam spills onto the beach.
Leela, listen, Umar, listen
to the sound water makes, evaporating from rocks.

We disperse yet stay together, being
as we are
what we are, as well as the distance in between us.

XII. Footpath

Shaken in a brass canister, the body's ashes
make a noise: the wind brushing across
the egret's white breast feathers in a field

east of the pump factory. Devki, Ai's servant, weeps,
then rides away into the night on her lover's bike. Behind her
in a daylight that won't die

a water buffalo stands knee-deep in the Hindalga pond
up the hill. When someone burns the bus
with Muslims in it, Devki watches bats hanging upside down

in a banyan north of where her mind
usually goes. Holding my young daughter's
hand, I walk back to the house. What year it is

no longer matters. "The night
flies into the trees, daddy," five-year-old Leela
laughs, using a Marathi phrase in a then

that's also now, as, in late afternoon on a cliff,
the priest observes how she, grown, a bride, observes
the ceremonial fire. "Yes," she intones, marrying

complexity's evolutions . Ai, her grandmother, crouches
on a hill, rifle on her lap, studying
dusk's purple ganerie flowers

sixty years ago. The sea, the old woman's shadow
breaks on the rocks below. In the last year, Ulfat
dead in Srinagar and, another year, Mansur killed on a bus, and still

the shenai players' notes rise, at least
for this one moment, above the family's grief.
My new son embraces me. Sunfire turns sea to steam. In

1988 the tea kettle whistles in a cramped kitchen
in which the old woman, seated on the floor,
drinks tea. Through the window, a papaya tree. Further off,

her daughter, Suman, trudges through monsoon rains, rallying
angry workers. At last the daughter arrives, in another age's dry season,
at her own daughter's wedding, crying because

the dead showed us the way. Here the cliff and here the sea
and here, after sunset, a tentative beginning:
a footpath among rocks, jasmine's dim glow.

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The Krishna Poems

-- Published in Whiskey Island Magazine --

in memory of Malati

Note: Krishna is the "blue-bodied" god of ancient Indian mythology.
Mirabai was a 12th century upper-class woman who, after fleeing a bad
marriage and renouncing a life of wealth among the nobility, became
a wandering Krishna devotee, claiming Krishna as her divine lover
and writing songs/poems in his praise. Malati was neither mythological
figure nor priestess. Her hands smelled of garden dirt. Her husband's
death and her angina taught her, she once told me, to shell peas better.
She was my mother-in-law. She died in 1986.

1. Searching

Strange horse with muscles that shiver:

moonlit water.

Through how many villages does the obscure animal

travel at night?

He is the river, the Jamuna.

At dawn, will the dove coo?

Morning and night, the exhausted mind-stream wanders blindly,

looking for you.

Krishna watches over me.

He knows what I do.

2. Remembrances

Darker than banyan bark,

the god Krishna sits in dusk grass near a river.

The river, a faint memory, winds by

his mind's edge.

This is a picture I imagine while sitting at a table.

But now the taste of boiled rice

sprinkled with coriander distracts me!

A woman with false teeth, Malati, roams from room to room;

outside, a soft breeze tickles a frog's belly.

That was years ago.

I can no longer remember the number of planets.

Still, I am happy. I reach out

to touch her hair but she is not there.

3. Happy Devotee

As an act of devotion,

I become Malati's cow, her pet

behind the pump factory.

My tiny friend, the fly, flits

giddily near my huge nostrils.

When I moo deliriously out of tune, my damp

exhalations rock the insect o so gently in the air.

4. Unnamed Illness

In the dream: a white crane ankle-deep in paddy water.

Somewhere else: ghostfeet, fleeing upward,

softly pat a fire-escape's rusted steps.

I'm not well:

a slipped disk, sinus headaches, a penis

that leaks pee when I don't want it to.

I roll over feverishly in bed.

Is that the smell of jasmine in Bombay?

Or rice and beans on 118th St.?

Is Krishna pumping iron at the Y on 34th St.?

Where am I?

I sense a hint of rain in the air.

In one of many cities I have lived in, I remember this:

lightning flashes

the earth spreads its legs

the grass grows insanely green

in Hindalga where the pump factory is.

In the adjacent house, Malati's son Anand sings wordlessly

in a daylight that doesn't give up its life for us.

5. Transcendence

Odd-shaped clouds

tumble, large cotton balls,

over the tops of Rodney Square trees

into the lap of the woman

seated on the park bench in Wilmington.

I am that woman, or at least would be

if I wasn't a man.

I edge closer. I am

the autumn bird tweeting

just beyond her reach.

"Listen, o yes listen

to that creature sing,"

she thinks.

Me, I am Krishna. Don't let

the cheap wine on my breath

fool you.

Where's India?

Is it hidden in Greenville, under

Mrs. du Pont's mink?

The late-afternoon wind: a lost memory returning.

Tomorrow it will rain all day.

I remember the monsoon:

how the pretty snake sleeps in tall grass

near the flooded rice paddy.

From here to there, a sweet journey.

Fuck you Xenophobia. Fuck you Bigotry.

I love the cultures that live within me.

6. Yes to the Simple

Don't yell at me, Mr. Know-It-All!

Instead, suck that

dead locust twig in the grass

in the graveyard, over there, next to the big crypt.

Jesus, Muhammad and Vivekananda

can all visit Mr. or Mrs. Whomever in the sanitarium.

Me, I love my gods or goddesses fitted

in bodies bluer than noon lake water.

Yes, the "dark one" dwells in my heart.

I want to be like Mirabai, wandering

like a mad whore or beggar

from town to town while humming ditties

that cheer simpletons like me.

7. A Quiet Materialism

City. Night air, textured

as a mass of black hair.

I bury my head in it.

Do birds sing here?

Or saxes play more jubilantly than elsewhere?

Come here, let's talk, swing open

the door:

I've lit a stick

of sandalwood incense for you.

Think about oppression, gardenias, the cosmos.

No snow or white horse tonight, bro.

Just you, me, history, and the sound

in the background

of baby Krishna gulping milk.

8. Unaware

Wart Nose, they called her, the one

who handed me peach yogurt in a cup.

"You got beautiful brown eyes," she said to me when I was 19,

"or leastways they wuz once. Now they're gettin duller like your brain," she laughed.

Another time, tongue-tied, we stared at each other near the river.

It was autumn and people trekked by in jackets too thin

to soften the blows of that billyclub-sized flute, the wind.

"Brooklyn," I nodded toward the other shore.

"Look at them bridge-lights!" she declaimed.

I wanted to get out of there, and she knew it.

"Yeah, yeah," she whispered.

Night air, barges on water, stars, even, somewhere, sitars.

Sitars? Where'd that word come from back then?

Is it possible that, without knowing it, I was Krishna,

a speck of dirt and piss and brain,

the only divinity an idiot world like this should adore,

waiting to be reborn?

9. Message to Whom?

I'd wear jangling anklets and dance at night in a roadside gully if it'd help.

But it won't.

10. Does It Matter?

In a project courtyard:

rags on a clothesline, while blocks away

a Guatemalan ship, loaded with bananas, rocks gently

on night waves too subtle for the tired mind to understand.

At dawn, a pink lightstreak expands

on the horizon like a frail ray of hope

spawned by a big talker.

Who snuck into the courtyard last night?

The reek of sweaty sneakers still lingers

near the crushed mums under my window.

Will the visitor return?

What did he or she look like?

Does it matter?

11. Living in a Dying World

They took my job and sent it somewhere else

while all around me the country went to hell.

They led me from my room into the street

and asked me to clap my hands to a rock 'n' roll beat.

I sat on the curb and tried to remember the future, a possible bloom.

Instead, I saw a long corridor at the end of which stood a room

in which an infant or a grown person turned blue

while trying to break loose from a dialysis machine.

I screamed.

Was it or wasn't it a dream?

I remember my grandfather: a machinist's hands

and one glass eye.

Like him I live

and then I die.

I want to kiss Krishna goodbye, but I turn away because his face is marred

by open sores that smell like putrid fruit in a cracked jar.

12. Road to Jubilation

Late afternoon clouds, jaundice-yellow,

drift above buildings,

then turn darker and disgorge themselves.

Rain slashes the street.

I stand in a laundromat doorway.

In my head, park trees turn an impossible green

as children sail toy boats on a lake

too idyllic to actually exist.

In the state hospital on Rt. 13,

the simplicity I long for is evidenced in odd behaviors.

All night, against car hoods and cocktail lounge windows,

the rain drums.

It is the sound of Krishna moaning

as he slurps sewage from a ditch

in Moscow, the Bronx, Delhi or Madrid.

Follow him.

Suck philosophy from a mouse's nostril.

Gently pry open a parakeet's beak in search of an alleyway beyond the stars.

Slamdance your way into a state of wounded jubilation.

13. Caught

What I want is bigger than a full moon, and rarer.

It is rarer than the light from such a moon seething like a sea at which a dwarf gorilla gazes

while standing upon a precipice in a forest on another planet in a dream.

It is that rare, what I seek: elusive

like the is in isn't and as deadly as simplicity.

It escapes me in the daytime, escapes me in the deepest sleep.

Rare, so very rare.

I'm ensnared.

14. Voice of Love

I'm Mr. Magik, talker extraordinaire.

Sniff my multi-colored snotrag

and wren's eggs will fly to heaven

in the bellies of manta rays who don't know where they're going.

O yeah I know how to blab fast

and what I say I forget fast too!

To pick a posy or break a promise,

it's all the same, lamebrain!

Don't wait for me, hon:

I'm gone!

Under the sea with the fishes and broken dishes,

I ache for a partner, a Mr. or Mrs.

When the sun rages and the mists burn,

I, the Lord Krishna, will return.

I will speak to you with respect, my warm breath trotting, a furred thing with tiny feet,

across that wondrous tundra, the nape of your neck.

15. Miracle

In starlight the starving thief sneaks

through a warehouse door in Brooklyn or Bombay:

I love him and bless him on his way.

Somewhere else, a disgusted figure lurks

beyond the margins of buy and sell;

he creates a heaven where there once was hell.

I go to him, I am him: the man near night water.

"Krishna," Mirabai said, "sits on a dark blanket beside the dark river."

My knees shake, my hands quiver.

16. Never

Years ago, toothless Malati sat on a bed's edge,

brushing long gray hair.

Was it, she wondered, moonlight

or angina that made her chest ache?

She laid down and spoke in a voice thinner

than a cricket's leg.

Something about her eyelashes, the way

they moved in the darkness

(tiny beating wings of midget geese in a strange flock flying god knows where!)

reminded me of realities I'd never again forget.

That night, after waking on a train near Poona,

I remembered her hair, how it poured

dusk-like

over tree branches, under which

youthful Krishna brooded for women as sensual as her.

In the morning: Bombay.

I never saw her again.

17. Mind

Mickey Bykov on the wagon in Detroit.

Anand, in Belgaum, whiskeyless behind the pump factory.

All the old dudes grow more focused as they hunt down

wherever it is yellow flowers come from.

Who, drunk, can see the night road?

Who, hungover at dawn, can slither

through a wallcrack into a room in paradise?

Like my buddies, I ache to ache soberly,

I want to know, unfiltered, the pain that stuns me.

Who cares where Krishna is?

Although she's dead, Malati is here.

I touch her hair and remember the power of her mind, and how

hurt birds shrieked -- weirdly triumphant -- in her eyes.

18. Can You?

Dinanath, husband of the lowly,

I am your betrothed.

Shyam, my physician whose stethoscope detects

the sound of fingernails growing in musty cellars,

I am your betrothed.

Malati, with the blood of how many lotuses

falling like raindrops on your toes,

I am your betrothed.

You are all Krishna.

On hands and knees, I creep

through the deity's big intestine, locate the exit hole and leap

Stars and flowers, people weeping

in the Antilles the Bronx Delhi Haiti Moscow Tennessee

I kiss my children's eyelids.

I ask them, Can you see?

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Elijah's Mindset after Rudy Slurs a Customer

-- Published in Thunder Sandwich --

Now exiled more, or less,
he retracts his turgid divinity,
returns to harsh temporal streets
where uncertain crossings reflect
his true country.

-- Anthony McNeill

Whoever said
raindrum first,
I like them. Remembering

my only trip to the Philippines
where among stony hillpaths
language is the stones
monsoon storms beat upon, I hear

what isn't here: mud sliding
through a hut's doorway, the bittern's
beating wings, foam

at the storm-whipped river's edges. To return
home that year, I worked in a boiler room
on a freighter to Madras and then

further west. Finally
back in Baltimore, I heard
the raindrum's wild rhythms
as I snapped my fingers and danced
in a wharf-front bar, whirling
away from anyone

who tried to touch me
as I honed my skills as one
of the sidestep's most talented
choreographers. And so, as in

the species' evolution, movement
comes first and only later
language -- but when it
came, it took control. Even now, I still love
how it's improvised from anything -- maybe Amy's baby lying dead
in the Newark motel dumpster or the smell
of olives near the train station wafting
from David's slit wrists, 1961. Or was it
'62? If

u steal a harlequin from Miss Sarah's storefront
and take it to the prom, this
is what you get: less than what you should. And so tonight, Amy's
baby dead for months now, the infant whispers
"This is for you," which is when

in The Charmers
Rudy throws his best punch, misses
by a mile, gets floored , then heaved
out the door. Lying
on the street he yells

bastard asshole neighborhood-ruiner!
at a passerby

whose prissy gait or was it his
Jewish-looking nose or

-- Rudy loses consciousness now, which is when
his mind's eye, a tomato plant
trapped in the only plot
it's ever known, dies, done in

at last by the hornworm's birth
into an unjust world where it's the killer
in the veggie patch and yet

in spite of this

sometimes a bully, beaten
to a pulp, is left squirming on his belly
on the sidewalk late a night
while the moon sheds light on things the bully

never could and still can't
figure out.

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Leaving

-- Published in Thunder Sandwich --

Eyes half closed against noon light. A seagull flies
into the wind above a Martinique beach's
black sand. Up all night
and in a few hours the plane leaves. Days ago
the tanner told me, as I listened eagerly, how he confessed his craving
for pineapples to the priest. It's you
who interests me most, though. Your wrist pulse
is the Warsaw ghetto: so much going on
but soon deadly quiet. Low
blood pressure. Maybe today
the newspaper vendor will sell me a paper in which
I can read about
what happens next --
"It's impossible, completely impossible," you insist.
" No, it isn't," I reply.
But I wonder.
Most of the Jews are slain, and most of the Sioux
and your great-grandmother too and great-grandfather.
So who's the seer who'll foresee the unseen?
Hickory, dickory, dock.
I wish I knew what calculus is but I don't.
And you? Your disappearances:
more real than your presence ever was.
When I reached out to touch you two mornings ago
you'd already gone to the Bata church
to pray to the Virgin of the palm frond and spoonbill --
your distance was, then as now,
less like the water I'll soon fly over
than like this veranda
with its potted orchids rotting in the sun.