Art and Politics / Politics and Art 9780815651185, 9780815609766

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Art and Politics Politics and Art

Also by D. H. Melhem POET RY

Notes on 94th Street Rest in Love Children of the House Afire / More Notes on 94th Street Country: An Organic Poem Poems for You (chapbook) Conversation with a Stonemason New York Poems PROSE

Blight: A Novel (Book I of the trilogy Patrimonies) Stigma & The Cave: Two Novels (Books II and III of the trilogy Patrimonies) Heroism in the New Black Poetry: Introductions and Interviews Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice Reaching Exercises: The IWWG Workshop Book EDITOR

Mosaic: Poems from an IWWG Workshop A Different Path: An Anthology of RAWI (with Leila Diab) MUSICAL DRAMA

Children of the House Afire

Art and Politics Politics and Art D. H. Melhem

Syracuse University Press

Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, New York 13244-5290 Copyright © 2010 by D. H. Melhem All Rights Reserved First Edition 2010 10 11 12 13 14 15

6 5 4 3 2 1

Mohamad El-Hindi Books on Arab Culture and Islamic Civilization are published with the assistance of a grant from the M.E.H. Foundation. ∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences–Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. For a listing of books published and distributed by Syracuse University Press, visit our Web site at SyracuseUniversityPress.syr.edu. ISBN: 978-0-8156-0976-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Melhem, D. H. Art and politics / politics and art / D. H. Melhem. — 1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-8156-0976-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) I. Title. PS3563.E442A89 2010 811'.54—dc22 Manufactured in the United States of America

2010007005

For Dana, Gregory, George The International Women’s Writing Guild and noble comrades in peace everywhere

D. H. Melhem, Ph.D., is the author of seven previous books of poetry, including New York Poems (an omnibus volume that contains two early books); Country, a book-length poem sequence about the United States; Rest in Love, a widely acclaimed elegy for her mother; and Conversation with a Stonemason. Born in Brooklyn, New York, to Lebanese immigrants, she is a lifelong resident of New York City, where her two children were born and raised. Melhem is also author of the trilogy Patrimonies, comprising Blight (distributed by Syracuse University Press and optioned as a feature film), and Stigma & The Cave: Two Novels (published by Syracuse University Press). Of two scholarly works, Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice is the first comprehensive study of the poet. The other, Heroism in the New Black Poetry, presents an introduction to and interviews with six black poets including Brooks. Melhem wrote and produced Children of the House Afire, a musical drama based on her poems about her Upper West Side neighborhood, published over seventy essays, and edited two anthologies. Her Notes on 94th Street was the first poetry book in English by an Arab American woman and was proposed by Gwendolyn Brooks for a Pulitzer Prize. Among Melhem’s numerous awards for poetry and prose are a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, an American Book Award, a City University of New York Ph.D. Alumni Association Special Achievement Award, and a RAWI (Radius of Arab American Writers, Inc.) Lifetime Achievement Award. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of New York University, she serves as vice president of the International Women’s Writing Guild. For audio of the poet, please visit the Web site http://www.dhmelhem.com.

O! the one Life within us and abroad . . . —SA M U EL TAY LOR COLER I DGE , “The Eolian Harp”

Contents

AU T HOR’S PR EFACE : A Context ACK NOW LEDGM EN TS

•

•

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Certain Personae Kwansaba for Richard Wright • 3 Kwansaba for Amiri Baraka • 4 Kwansaba for Jayne Cortez • 5 Song for Angela Davis in the Women’s House of Detention • 6 Naked Woman Walks Down the Street • Chanel, Arbus, Duccio • 8 John Updike and My Mother • 10 Lincoln’s Summer House • 11 Poem for Elizabeth Cady Stanton • 12 Hannibal Crossing the Alps • 16

Mostly Political “April is the cruellest month . . .” • 21 Email Surveillance • 22 Polar Icecaps • 23 Daybreak • 24 Capitalism • 25

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Turtle • 28 Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale • 30 April 2004 • 33 A Chipped Tooth • 34 New York Epic • 35

Wars Those Policemen Are Sleeping • 41 To My Unknown Sister in Beirut • 44 Gulf War • 46 Delivering Mail in Fallujah • 56 Bombing Blues • 59 Suicide Bomber (2001, 2009) • 61 Just Breathing • 63 Some Questions for a Missile • 65 Artillerymen in the Shower • 66 Hecuba to Hector • 68 Service for the Dead • 69 For Gaza • 70 Variations on a Theme by Andrea Mantegna • 71

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Author’s Preface A Context I have always adored the sea, and now that I can no longer go for a swim, I have surrounded myself with it. —H E N R I

M AT ISSE ,

“The Swimming Pool”

Growing up in Brooklyn before World War II, I would sit by the window and write poems. From the age of eight I delighted in the arts. Alternating between poetry and drawing, escaping piano practice into my own tunes, by adolescence I turned to painting, sketching, and then sculpture, while continuing to write poems, stories, and prose pieces. When my pursuits seemed diffuse, at twenty I chose to focus on writing. I expected to resume my efforts in the visual and plastic arts “later on,” a horizon stubbornly remote. In the manner of Matisse surrounding himself with the sea, I continued to immerse myself in art. I frequented museums and galleries and occasionally wrote poems about works that had moved me. Decades later I learned the category had a name: “ekphrastic poems.” Recently, I thought this volume might be devoted exclusively to them. More and more, however, politics was cramming my consciousness. It jumped fences. It mixed and merged

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with aesthetic material. Although many of the art works that interested me had a strong political context, my category restriction seemed arbitrary, cumbersome; the sense of urgency, profound. I realized that war—even wars beginning long before World War II—had shaped my family’s life and affected my own. My father, Nicholas, born and raised in Lebanon, was orphaned at thirteen. His mother was Lebanese; his father had been born on the island of Samos, Greece. Thus he, like his father, held dual citizenship of Lebanon and Greece. As a potential “Greek” enemy, at sixteen my father, his sister, and a brother were sent into exile in Turkey for a year during World War I. I recall his vivid stories of the time and of his father’s father: a vigorous, red-bearded man who had fought in the Greek War of Independence. After World War I, Nicholas and his friends leafleted Tripoli in secret, at night, worrying the British and French authorities that there was a widespread movement for Lebanese independence. My mother, Georgette, was born to Lebanese parents who lived in Mersin, a coastal city of Asia Minor (Turkey). Her father disappeared after taking a train to the interior. A year later, he was assumed to be the victim of a political assassination and was declared legally dead. His widow and eight of their nine children immigrated to the United States, where they settled in Brooklyn. My father had emigrated shortly before, naïvely trusting a report of free engineering education in Detroit. When he arrived there, it happened to be a time of severe economic distress. Disappointed, he was happy to join his friends from abroad—my mother and her family—in New York. I grew up knowing only one president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom I, like my family, profoundly

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admired. We shared the excitement—and benefits—of the New Deal and put an “NRA: We Do Our Part” sign in the window. One of my maternal uncles spent a summer working in a CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) camp. I had a first-class education in public elementary and high schools (we had no junior highs). In the lower school, in addition to art and music appreciation, gym, clubs, and a literary magazine, boys studied shop (carpentry) and girls studied sewing. We sewed our graduation dresses (a practical economy). Voted “class athlete” in elementary school, I was graduated from Girls Commercial High School as “class poet.” An academic school in Brooklyn, it offered a sumptuous variety of courses, including poetry. There, a radiant Eleanor Roosevelt memorably addressed us in the auditorium. We enjoyed our large swimming pool and faced a rigid graduation requirement to swim its length. This was an era of grand projects (like dams) and heroes. Of the latter, I had many, both literary and political. Thomas Paine was a favorite, along with the Brooklyn Dodgers’ baseball team. In high school, civics, livened by current events, lifted our pride in the United States. We admired its new “Good Neighbor Policy” toward Latin America and fostering of the United Nations, whose anthem we sang. It seemed just that a woman, Frances Perkins, had been named Secretary of Labor. Roosevelt himself was a hero. Confined to a wheelchair, he faced down powerful negative forces and showed practical concern for common people in the Depression. Our respect and support carried him through four elections until his death on April 12, 1945, as World War II was ending. Afterward we learned of the hideous “Final Solution,” the systematic extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. Jews were recognized as victims of a terrible human and

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moral atrocity. The complicated history of Palestine, nevertheless, following the end of the British Mandate and the United Nations proposal of partition into Israel and Palestine, has remained one of war and conflict in the area ever since. And so art and politics, politics and art, moving together, bestir these pages. They continue to engage some of my deepest concerns. May they stir your thoughts as well.

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Acknowledgments Poems have previously appeared in various publications, as follows: Certain Personae: “Kwansaba for Richard Wright” (2008), “Kwansaba for Amiri Baraka” (2005), and “Kwansaba for Jayne Cortez” (2006), Drumvoices Revue (tribute issues). “Song for Angela Davis in the Women’s House of Detention,” Children of the House Afire / More Notes on 94th Street (1976), reprinted and revised in New York Poems (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005). “Naked Woman Walks Down the Street,” Conversation with a Stonemason (New York: IKON, 2003). “Chanel, Arbus, Duccio,” And Then 14 (2008): 98; “Lincoln’s Summer House,” And Then 15 (2010): 56. “John Updike and My Mother,” Long Island Sounds: 2009, An Anthology of Poetry (Southampton, N.Y.: North Sea Poetry Scene Press, 2009). Mostly Political: “April is the cruellest month,” Orbis 148 (2009): 60. “Email Surveillance,” issue 38, and “Turtle,” Shabdaguchha, tenth anniversary issue 40 (2008): 4. “Polar Icecaps,” http://www.poetz.com/2008/dhmelhem. htm. “Daybreak,” Confrontation 104 (Summer 2009): 166. “Capitalism,” Children of the House Afire / More Notes on 94th Street (1976); sections 1 and 2 reprinted in New York Poems (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,

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2005); section 3, from Country: An Organic Poem (Merrick, N.Y.: Cross-Cultural Communications, 1998). “April 2004,” Newsday, April 30, 2004. “A Chipped Tooth,” The Long-Islander, “Walt’s Corner,” January 14, 2010, p. A9. “New York Epic,” Banipal (United Kingdom) 29 (Summer 2007): 31–33. Wars: “Those Policemen Are Sleeping,” first published http://www.poetz.com/2002/dhmelhem.htm (2002); reprinted in Birthed from Scorched Hearts (Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, 2008) and in Poets for Palestine (New York: Al Jisser Group, 2008). “To My Unknown Sister in Beirut,” And Not Surrender: American Poets on Lebanon (Washington, D.C.: Arab American Cultural Foundation, 1982); slightly modified in Conversation with a Stonemason (New York: IKON, 2003). “Gulf War” was first published in Food for Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists, ed. Joanna Kadi (Boston: South End Press, 1994); it was subsequently published in Cultural Activisms: Poetic Voices, Political Voices, ed. Gertrude M. James Gonzalez and Anne J. M. Mamary (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). “Delivering Mail in Fallujah,” Home Planet News 52 (2005): 2. “Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale,” Home Planet News 60 (2008): 18. “Service for the Dead,” Home Planet News 56 (2007): 17. “Bombing Blues,” Mizna 2, no. 1 (2001). “Suicide Bomber,” Mizna 11, no. 1 (2009): 28. “Just Breathing,” Al Jadid 13–14 nos. 58–59 (2007–2008): 17. “Some Questions for a Missile,” Al Jadid 9, no. 44 (2003): 6. “Artillerymen in the Shower,” http://www. poetrybay.com/winter2005/index_winter2005.html. “For Gaza,” Socialism and Democracy 23, no. 2 (July 2009): 116. “Hecuba to Hector” and “Variations on a Theme by

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Andrea Mantegna,” Conversation with a Stonemason (New York: IKON, 2003). To all the above and to their editors, grateful acknowledgment is made.

• Once again I extend my deepest gratitude to Mary Selden Evans for her ever-replenishing faith in all my work. Lynn P. Hoppel designed a brilliant cover. My appreciation to the editorial/production staff for their diligent attention. To Dana Marie Vogel, first reader of my poetry, and to Gregory Melhem Vogel, first reader of my prose, I remain profoundly indebted for critical help and judgment. To George Meyer, my joy in his steadfast poetic regard.

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Certain Personae This is a subtle truth: Whatever you love, you are. —J EL A LU DDI N

RU M I

(1207–1273)

Kwansaba for Richard Wright You kept watch as, bearing scars, seen and unseen, you headed North, your hazy notion: dignity, a life that could be lived devoid of fear or shame, with natural respect, and free to wrest some meaning from the pain you had endured beneath the stoic witness of the stars.

Poet/teacher/scholar Eugene B. Redmond, inventor of the kwansaba, defi nes it thus in his magazine Drumvoices: “The kwansaba, a 49-word poetic form invented during the Writers Club’s 1995 workshop season (in East St. Louis), consists of seven lines of seven words each, with no word containing more than seven letters. (Think 7-7-7!) Exceptions to the seven-letter rule are proper nouns and some foreign terms.” In submitting my poem for the Richard Wright Centennial issue of Drumvoices Revue (vol. 16, nos. 1–2, 2008), I wrote Redmond, “The closing passage of his Black Boy is so beautiful that I used it as the epigraph to the second part of my book-length poem Country: An Organic Poem (1998), about the United States. The kwansaba is based on this quotation. I hope I did it—and this great writer—justice.”

3

Kwansaba for Amiri Baraka Proud Black bridge to nonskin politic, you pour your molten steel of poems from a lectern pound their music into stars free their drum voice talking blues talk jazz talk race rising talk people power talk across borders raising hearts raising fists radiant with unity rays of constant change

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Kwansaba for Jayne Cortez Drums earth sweat hot jazz cool blues and Yoruba gods anoint your brain to birth your poems from heart and bone burst from the navel of furious dreams while finger snaps and left foot taps rhythms of thunder whose wild new trails rise black within you leading the steps.

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Song for Angela Davis in the Women’s House of Detention angela davis angela davis body is caged but your mind goes out to the street like a panther passing through stone staining ground with immovable shadows truth is that last light in the eye of pain will not close with the lid of a coffin until every grave empties its light every gutter runs grief to the sewer until grief is flowing free around every island and the world drowns in unused dreams and the world drowns in unused dreams

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Naked Woman Walks Down the Street for B., E., and G.

majestic a living statue with a train of curious children who crown her with laughter and shrieks. Before she rounds the corner to be plucked into a police car, I see her lead an army of homeless people who rise up from Penn Station and Grand Central and the Port Authority Bus Terminal and the next block. And the woman is clothed in rainbow and light from hummingbird wings. Her followers turn to moving stone and bronze. They drop off in ones and twos along Broadway, stationing themselves at the head of subway stairs. Their hands are raised and their fists are clenched. Their stone and bronze children are pointing. One cannot run past without touching them. The touch is electric to feel those statues— their malice, their might.

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Chanel, Arbus, Duccio Three Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum I Robed in the shimmery moment’s flow of fabric, viewers glide their sinuous inquiry, thread columns through translucent decades of flat women pressed to mannequins, draped and beaded black or pallid hues. Phantom fingers (one is thimbled) stitch with finest needles, dip into silk or trim wool suits with braid; one sly droplet of blood, sucked quickly. II Diane Arbus: Glaring portraits, meditations on Coney Island, a nudist colony, the street where teenagers caught in a morphing minute between the years before and decades after, stripped of pose, exposed to raucous light, trusting, suspicious, fierce, fearful of you and the camera blade releasing skin to paper. III Duccio of Siena sets his small Madonna and Child

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behind a parapet, the black-draped mother, child in symbolic red, stylized, with tiny Jesus about to grow into his inheritance, future already worn into his face, and his mother’s.

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John Updike and My Mother I think you wrote those closing sonnets for us, not for the page that held your rising wreckage inches above the flood, before mere words would claim you whole. You spent those few red leaves of energy like autumn glimpsing winter in a whirling gust, telling us how it is, that we are not alone nor will we be despite the final solitude, that one can make the last throw on a potter’s wheel a formal taking leave, its strict release gracing the turn that wrenches free of time. This is the way I saw and see my mother, who forty years ago slid past my clutching, my fierce yearning poised to follow her. But she had left her spirit-breath, her loving bones for me to introject the strength and beauty shed to shape my legacy. Love comes from life and from the quiet page. A cradle and a platform where we launch our spirits, power we share, deepening life, regenerating it.

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Lincoln’s Summer House In Lincoln’s Summer House there was no peace, though miles from importuning citizens who streamed to the White House, certain of his aid. The Summer House, a wartime gift to the nation, stood watch beside the newly built Veterans’ Home where Lincoln sometimes dined with the servicemen and cheered them by his presence, spoke and ate whatever simple meals they all might share, with Rock Creek National Cemetery dug behind them. From his window the president watched the Union dead. Hour by hour they were carted in, averaged thirty-eight a day, were measured by coffins buried in strict rows, hour by hour. Young men silent, stiff, used up. One studies Lincoln’s face, the monumental grief carved into it, the field of sorrows fled to lenses of his eyes entrapped in hollow hues of blue and black and gray.

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Poem for Elizabeth Cady Stanton On the Occasion of Naming 250 West Ninetyfourth Street, “The Stanton,” November 11, 2007 I stand where you stood, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, foremother extraordinary, born in Johnstown, New York, November 12, 1815, daughter of Daniel Cady and Margaret Livingston Cady, eighth of eleven children, five of whom died in infancy. You were the guide of our painful footsteps to women’s suffrage. For yourself you wanted a full, woman’s life and more, and you made it to your own unique measure, bearing seven children, making speeches for women’s rights when they had none, and writing, writing, writing after all that reading in your father’s law library as a young girl. Early on you debated legal issues with his law clerks: how the law favored men in all matters, how married women had paltry rights over property, income, employment, or even custody rights over their own children. A female, you could not attend Union College, like your brother Eleazar. He died at age twenty, before graduation. Comforting your father, you told him you would try to be all that your brother would have been. “Oh, my daughter,” he cried. “If only you were a boy.” Decades later, in your memoir, you wrote of your pain. Still, you were formally educated, at Johnstown Academy and the Female Seminary at Troy. Revivalists

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abounded. One terrified you with fires of damnation. Rescued by father and brother-in-law, you journeyed to Niagara Falls. Held in its thundering sunlight you received the healing mists of Nature. Pretty and lively and smart, you met Henry Stanton, shared his Abolitionist views and on everything except women’s rights. Yet you married him and honeymooned abroad. London, 1840: The International Anti-Slavery Convention. There you met Lucretia Mott. Women, you could not participate, sat in a roped-off section, feeling oppressed. Eight years later, with Mott, you organized the first Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, drafted a Declaration of Sentiments based on the Declaration of Independence. Frederick Douglass, the famed Black Abolitionist orator, supported you, spoke. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” you wrote, “that all men and women are created equal.” You met Susan B. Anthony. Ideas meshed. You wrote her speeches. She traveled to deliver them. When you exchanged your hearth for hazards of audiences, you worked with Anthony to organize women, publish a newspaper, The Revolution. You championed labor’s right to strike, called for equal pay for equal work. You journeyed together by train across country, speaking, earned money to help educate your children. Dauntless and witty, you dared to be outrageous.

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With Anthony, you wrote The History of Woman Suffrage. You testified in the Senate for the Sixteenth Amendment, granting suffrage without regard to sex. The amendment never left the committee. Weary of “wandering” you lectured; exhausted, you worked with Anthony on volume 2 of The History. Soon as the last proofs were read, daughter Harriot took you to Europe. In Paris, you lived with son Theodore and family. In London, with Harriot and hers. Alert to new ideas, you learned about Fabian socialism and British secularism. Enjoyed your family; forged international suffragist connections. In 1891, you returned home—this time to New York: the Stuart Apartments, 250 West 94th Street. You lived with daughter Margaret, widowed like you, and your youngest son, Robert. What did you see from your window, Elizabeth? Sight failing after the years of intense study and writing. Did you hear the ships on the Hudson? Voices of women— strong, laughing, shouting, women marching with colored banners, holding aloft their aspirations on signs: “Votes for Women.” As you sat by the window of your study, at your slant-top desk, leather-bound books in cases, among heavy Victorian furnishings, you drifted toward images of home upstate, young children running, boisterous, free. As women were not.

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Your eightieth birthday. Six thousand cheered your speech at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. The day after, you sat at your piano and sang “the old old songs” of your youth. “Bob,” you remarked, “life is a great mystery.” But the past held no pace for your journey. Two weeks later you published The Woman’s Bible, a feminist critique of Scriptures. And still you wrote. Susan B. Anthony was planning to attend your eighty-seventh birthday. Instead, desolate, she came to mourn you and times together when you “forged the thunderbolts and I fired them.” Before your casket her photograph stood like a sentinel. Elizabeth Cady Stanton: figured in history, in us whom you never knew, but rightly imagined.

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Hannibal Crossing the Alps J. M. W. Turner, Nicolas Poussin The canvas: sudden dark snow cloud on the right gathers the arc of the mountain and storms over the sun the earth the soldiers who march and keep marching as soldiers do the bidding of kings and generals, lieutenants, sergeants, everyone raised above them, higher, higher, a hierarchy of death, those at the bottom suspecting they are expendable, expecting the next meal and the next rest, a little excitement, a skirmish, a village to pillage, to burn, to take women, something to ease the aching and the cold. Hannibal: Your father, Hamilcar Barca, taught you to hate Rome, while Cato incited, “Delenda est Carthago,” Carthage must be destroyed. Rivalries of power. Your father took you to Spain. Raised you in the art of war. Was killed in battle. You stayed in Iberia. Served your brother-in-law. When he died, you took over the army. Catalogs of battles. Roman ambassadors warned you not to attack Sarguntum, demanded satisfaction from Carthage. The terrible war—

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the Second Punic War— the “war against Hannibal.” Battle after battle. Lake Trasimene. Your ambush of Romans drowned in rivers of their blood. The living sold into slavery. And the grand idea: crossing the Alps into Rome. Man went over the mountain Man went over the mountain And what do you think he saw? And what do you think he did? The canvas: Foreground, left. Two local tribesmen on a cliff observe the distant soldiers, and a figure atop an elephant. Natives caring for their wounded signal to comrades on the right as the procession continues. “Hannibal Crossing the Alps.” Poussin, two hundred years earlier. “The great storyteller,” appraised Bernini. Turner admired, yet believed, “The sun is God.” Poussin’s painting: smaller, somber, centers the elephant. Hannibal, helmeted, perches like a worrying bird

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atop Surus, the Syrian war animal. Pointing ahead, the general urges his troops onward. Hind legs of the great beast seem to buckle. Does he hear his lost companions, their agonized trumpeting as they die in the cold, see them still plodding, slipping, pulling, bearing as they slog over rocks, stones, and mud, in the fearsome strangeness of snow and mountains, while he goes on alone, carrying this shouting man among men who prod and scream and gather in muttering groups and kneel to cup water near his feet? In the Frick Museum, Turner canvases face and flank the visiting Poussin. Turner sheds light and sky, nature and people. Poussin: the ardent moment, its ground. Matters of history. Truths of art. J. M. W. Turner, Snowstorm: Hannibal and His Army, Crossing the Alps, viewed (on loan) at the Metropolitan Museum, Sept. 21, 2008, last day of exhibition. Nicolas Poussin, Hannibal Crossing the Alps, viewed (on loan) at the Frick Museum, New York, Dec. 5, 2008.

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Mostly Political No one loves him whom he fears. Rhetoric, II Man is by nature a political animal. Politics, III — A R ISTOT L E (384–322 BC)

Today we say all art is political. But I’d say all art has to do with ethics. Which after all really comes to the same thing. —I NGM A R

BE RGM A N

“April is the cruellest month . . .” If Eliot’s April is the cruellest month and Chaucer’s showers sweet drop acid rain and every other moon that earthlings meet radioactivates the harvest grain, while planes and sunburnt soldiers aim to blow quivering bodies into acrid dust thickening air for eons that remind how history repeats its failed trust, greed and vengeance grind their rituals into the backs of people whom they hit, reap fiery profits from the rudest graves. Any month is what you make of it.

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Email Surveillance hops on my shoulder looks over it swims through my gaze waves from computer screen floats on my surfride dives into my hard drive

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Polar Icecaps I’m holding on to the rail, the ride is so fast. .

—C. I.

Yes—let’s hold on tightly as we watch the waters rise from melting polar icecaps where bears float off on floes abducting them— mystified, diving toward caverns of the sea. And at an aftertime we’ll wonder, too (a trifle late) where we should emigrate and just how far inland, and whether erratic weather there will loose a feral vengeance like downtown floods we fled to higher ground uptown, and now once more must flee, abandoning submerged real estate and soggy towers, address of sharks and whales and bloated bears and plankton’s avid genes where we began and might begin again, and then might not.

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Daybreak Day steps through the window kisses me on both cheeks. Formality? Friendship? Yesterday morning started out well— see what happened. Should have skipped that one. People accuse my naïveté. Still I like new light.

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Capitalism 1. the girls The girls out there are young and scared stand tall on platform shoes their pimps at the corner in phone booths watching Walking my dog at night I, too, am scared the crazies must march their torments that crowd them in small rooms, the junkies must find pushers and the drunks disgorge their anger The girls out there— set on the block at intervals stone-eyed caryatids of their littered turf I pass them pimps watching 2. pimps: from the Library glass-enclosed patio We sit, talking. The girls in the rain beyond our glass, our caul walk delicately with umbrellas as if balancing something of value on high wires. Across the street, four pimps stand under an awning::

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they are splendid in silver and sharkskin and broad-brimmed hats and rings and canes and high platform shoes to gauge their merchandise offered from that level their gaze like strings like wires pulled taut for the girls to walk on. 3. questions for an entrepreneur pimp did anyone love you little or hate you then? is commission your contact? are power and poverty so mixed in you that the girl you subdue who trusts you to protect her small interest is your pride the tarnished iridescence of a hatband? did Adam Smith, Vanderbilt, Morgan or Rockefeller weave your pallet of prurience? did they teach you the fun of the profit the enterprise? entrepreneur, landlord without land sultan of slumbodies you parade their gargoyle emblem for a pair of new shoes

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in a passing style for a roll with butter for a tinkling trinket and a dream-puffing weed boss, now selling your sister

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Turtle Backing out of the driveway I feel a crunch (a fallen branch?) pull forward over a soft bump. Wedged behind a rear tire: some yellowish thing, thick, mottled like a giant butterfly. A turtle—crushed open— intestines glaring. I try to clear the tread, prod with shoe tip what’s stuck to bluestone. Fetch gloves and trowel. Dig a hasty hole. Lift the victim with a paper bag. Tremors cease. Quick-bury (hide) with earth with leaves. Trembling, I take the wheel. A car’s collateral damage.

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In war, as here, it must be hard to see what you have done. And to bear it.

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Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale Painting by Max Ernst At nightfall, at the outskirts of a city, two children were threatened by a nightingale. —Poem by the artist

I In the foreground, a robed girl stands by a gate, holds a large kitchen knife. In the blue sky a bird wheels, an adult flies a child to safety. Or abducts the child. Wielding her knife, girl turns from a body. On the right: a kind of barn, cleaver framed above the doorknob. (In the distance an equestrian figure tops a triumphal arch and rides beside a dome.) Or is a plane hovering over intricate linkings that draw present to past, glory to simplicity, murder to rescue? Look through the day where sky charges toward you.

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Between sky and barn, doorknob fits a spool. The spool, blue and brown, is rolling up sky with earth. Bird, serene, would escape the scene. II I, too, would escape it. Who falls from the sky? Not Icarus. He died, seeking height. He was an idealist. He thought air was benign. It was benign. Now as bewildered children we look up at raptorial clouds, at adults who would seize our lives. High-tech proficiency disappears pain into coordinates on small screens. III If I held my infant as we hid in a cellar would my arms melt a shield around it? Should I—like the adult abducting/saving the child— steal their children?

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IV I shall revise the painting into a livable domain. The girl holds the kitchen knife but does not use it— nor does she wish to. She will replace it in a drawer. Her sibling is napping. The adult is flying a child to amuse it. The nightingale is not threatening, it has been misinterpreted. The flying adult and child coast on the notes of the bird whose sound lifts them higher. They will travel as far as they wish and return, exhilarated.

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April 2004 Winter kept regrouping to attack with scourging winds and rowdy relentless weather gripping the earth to frost, drawing it back toward last year’s compost heaps and a laggard blizzard, until one sudden morning on Broadway I looked up at the cherry trees as they, too long restrained, like love detained by war, burst open in a brave fragility and blossomed their defiant pink and white, as if the trees like martyrs might redeem a season or an army overstayed

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A Chipped Tooth All losses are restored and sorrows end. W I L LI A M SH A K ESPE A R E ,

Sonnet 30

Playing ringolevio on a Brooklyn street with a team in a wild, warlike competitive game— open-mouthed, laughing in panicked delight, I ran to elude the enemy and touch home base—the iron telephone pole where I crashed my smile and cracked a front tooth, chipped it, something a dentist would mend. Distantly, children of war are playing war games, learning in earnest where they might hide (if there is time), how they may face their fears (if they can), how to bear living with losses teams can’t restore, doctors or parents end.

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New York Epic O West Side Street that I am— I dip my toes into the Hudson my head wreathed in trees of Central Park asphalt and macadam graft my skin tall buildings lift my voices my glimmering children sled and tub slide down Dead Man’s Hill run to school buy pizza and play ball blessed by sun rain snow and orderly lives while at the corner a big-bellied woman laughs through spaces between her teeth and sings with musicians the sip of wine left in a bottle I caress the feet of gleaning-eyed girls dogwalkers and women in pride of their pregnancy and wheels of the order boy’s bicycle and roots of wild-armed ginkgoes I ache with the aged and belch manhole covers fire little bursts to let off steam get repaired when and where traffic is heavy while subway trains rattle my spine I crawl around Riverside Park carry the stream of us to the river the scream in the night the boombox autos the gunshot or backfire the hammering renovations going co-op or condo Gray gull hovers above me Brahms pours out of a window

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pigeonlady carries her breadsack winterwoman is wearing a scarf gloves and boots in July Doormen have ended their strike lovers in the grass stirring among dandelions gather boatcries make a bouquet of two colors Park mother stands among swings and slides and small children firming a station of handkerchiefs And the poet waits with oceanic embrace with stanchions of praise for the firemen and neighbors who come to help neighbors escape the red mountain of cries from a tenement building spitting out residents who flee down fire escapes and fall to wet snow The poet praises peace marchers marking the true line of this country she celebrates the tall ships slowly grandly moving upriver and ambulances rushing pain to sanctuaries she utters those who have seen what they cannot bear and sit in a doorway of dissolving bones

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I hold them all for awhile until they drift on and I am left with a smear of moonlight On that September 11th firemen rode uptown and walked across me in ghostly uniforms in their honor of white dust the shock time grasping all together I am steamrollered into its grief its broken jawbone sidewalks its arteries torn open its shredded wires now spliced in me with rainwind and heatwave with pipes in me the subway in me the waste in me the blood in me thickening I shudder along steel pilings drilled into foundation of a new building a fault line quivers to the north heat-pain awaiting signals from the river from the cooling ocean to the deepest hunkering leviathan Impulse of rain vaults across waters pelts me with world-horror triggers chaos around me wild with Baghdad and Fallujah

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the bomb craters of Kabul my gutters weep khaki and body parts wail with prayers from mosques and temples market air perfumed with sweet breath of dying children and sparked with random light of exploding eyeballs drowning in oil ripped from the earth set afire in the land and on waters burning me burning this street burning its heart out until no one comes home to me whole I am you—your lives run through me within me I am you and whatever you are intending stained by indelible ashes blown five miles uptown in an inconsolable shroud of acrid taste and trembling trembling trembling with continuing offense of a distant folly

Read by the author at the People’s Poetry Gathering, May 5–7, 2006, CUNY Graduate Center.

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Wars There is no way to peace; peace is the way. —A . J .

M UST E

I am sure what I said is true,—namely, that history . . . at bottom, is the account of the efforts . . . to find freedom and show love. —JA M ES

JAC K SON PU T NA M

Those Policemen Are Sleeping A Call to the Children of Israel and Palestine Caption: Four Palestinian police officers lie dead in a Ramallah office building, Saturday, March 30, 2002. The five bodies (one not pictured) all with gunshot wounds to the head, were laying in a dark hallway where the walls were splattered with blood and bullet holes. (AP Photo/ Nasser Nasser) Those policemen are sleeping. They lie, five in a doorway, each one neatly shot in the head, huddled like derelicts. In the dereliction of death, they cannot guard Ramallah, or Arafat, or anything or anyone. They cannot guard children or mothers or old men. Their blood, no longer confined, dances freely out the doorway toward blasted olive groves and rubble of bulldozed homes and shows its sad triumph in the street: We are fathers, lovers, people like yourselves! it cries. A few miles away Israeli children are sleeping. Dead in holiday clothes. A Palestinian boy in pieces among them. They are all sleeping, sleeping, all belong to one signature. They don’t need identification cards or passports. They don’t need to sign in or sign up. God/Allah/Jehovah welcomes them. It’s like a festival in heaven.

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Pesach and Easter, cakes and goodies and traditional sayings, chanting and singing and hard-boiled eggs, bitter herbs and date cakes. All the shades sharing one earth, a single territory, the air sweet above them, the sky a heavenly blue, while the music of the spheres, like bells of sunlight, chimes each flight into heaven. War keeps taking, taking sucks marrow, marries the dead to the dead and the living to the dead. War is insatiable, it has a stomach for youth the delectable sweetness of babies it spits out old people it spares lives as lottery prizes. And faith? What of faith? I have faith in sunlight, in moonlight, in a dandelion that gives its bitter food and plain beauty, in a smile, in the smell of soap, in a page turned slowly, faith in the Jesus of Peace, the Muhammad of Peace, the Moses of Peace, the Buddha of Peace, I have faith in the possible footsteps of Gandhi and King. What Moloch is this who beckons Israel? And beckons Palestine?

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Or is it a brave ancestor who fought vainly, who summons you to his fate? Is the world better off for the killing? Cure yourselves of the past. It loves only itself. Its plagues of grief and vengeance that heavily armor the heart and seemingly coat it with mail can be as light as a shroud or a mirage in your vision. Another world is possible.

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To My Unknown Sister in Beirut Sister unknown sister your voice reaches me from cedars shrouded in the rubble of your house and from your thirsty streets that drink blood and bake bodies like loaves of flat bread tossed into the sun Sister unknown sister our fearful brother brings bombs our brother who bought death from my father our brother who ate the blood-lust of his tormentors He ate their defeat and they took his victory And the song of his fighter jets screams screams the voices of children who were singing a people proud to be peaceful Sister unknown sister whose dark eyes shadow my escape are the olives bitter in your throat? Their pits embarrass the politicians your innocence

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the politicians your agony the politicians Sister my sister there are lessons to be learned from death

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Gulf War When the sky is rent asunder; when the stars scatter and the oceans roll together; when the graves are hurled about; each soul shall know what it has done and what it has failed to do. —Qur’an, 82:1

Eighty thousand sorties nonstop express over Baghdad a sound-and-light show takeout boxed into your livingroom (you can only see the nightskytop on TV; the bloody bottom of the picture mars the image). Look at the stars!1 look, look up at the skies! O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! Smart bombs and cruise missiles, F-16 fighter jets, Patriot antimissiles and rocket hardware. Everyone wants them now. (Was this a carnage commercial?) In the bomb shelter children are sleeping in the arms of their mothers. Not hungry, having supp’d full with horrors.2 Are targeted. Deliberately hit. Well, enemies are enemies. May hide anywhere.

1. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Starlight Night.” 2. Shakespeare, Macbeth, V.v.13. The reference here is to an actual occurrence, in which the air force corrected the misconception that the bombing of an air-raid shelter was accidental.

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Your red-and-white kaffiyeh was edged with lace crocheted by your mother in the family’s pattern. You wore a blue bead to ward off evil. It didn’t work. Iraq is a dry place, mostly, dry as cobblestones, and hot. “Iraq, with its Soviet-style strategy and Soviet-made arms, was the kind of opponent the Army has spent decades preparing to fight.”3 No figures, as yet, on civilian deaths. Maybe a hundred thousand. Plus a hundred thousand soldiers. A thousand of theirs to one of ours. We’re still number one. Try to make sense of it— boys who will kill other boys who will kill children asleep in the arms of their mothers and their mothers asleep with them. Arms and armaments twist into smoke. Even the tanks writhe and scream. Men and women kneel in the prayerful dust of ancient cities, in the new museum of bones and shell fragments. Daily they kneel five times, facing Mecca. Between the Tigris and the Euphrates Mesopotamia once flourished. The Tigris and the Euphrates carried great deposits of silt. The Tigris and the Euphrates 3. New York Times editorial, March 30, 1991.

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carry dead bodies to be oiled in the Persian Gulf. Cheetah, hyena, wolf, jackal, desert hare, and small mammals, the jerboa. The vulture, the raven, the owl, the hawk. In the west the country is nearly treeless. Places devoid of vegetation except for the bush of Christ’s thorn. “Although many think of it as a lifeless place, the desert is actually a teeming, though fragile, ecosystem. Home to a variety of spiders, snakes and scorpions as well as larger creatures like camels, sheep and gazelles, it is literally held together by microorganisms, which form a thin surface crust. This crust catches the seeds of sparse shrubs and prevents surface soil from blowing away. Once it is disturbed—by the maneuvers of a million soldiers, say—recovery can take decades. The Libyan desert still shows tank tracks laid down in World War II.”4 The Mesopotamian desert is strewn with the ruins of ancient cities, their royal tombs and hecatombs. In Sumer, five dynasties ruled before the Flood. The first capital was founded at Kish by 4000 BC. Sippar lay on the edge of the glacial shoreline. South of Sippar rose Akkad and its armies of Sargon.

4. Time, March 18, 1991, 37. Information on Iraq is culled from various reference works.

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Below Cuthah stood the great temples of Kish. Fifteen miles westward lie the ruins of Babylon. When the Euphrates changed course, it deserted its settled embankments. In the south, lakes became marshland. Now ancient cities are mounds, waterless, bare. Kish, Akkad, Babylon, Nippur, Nineveh, Borsippa, Uruk, Ur. Levels of excavation on caravan routes from Baghdad. Baghdad, the Abode of Peace, foremost city of Mesopotamia, preserved the name it has held for 4,000 years. It was once a fertile land of gardens, the home of merchants and scholars, renowned for learning, for silks and tiled buildings, enlightened caliphs, tales of the Arabian Nights. In 1258 Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghiz, sacked the city. The Mongols destroyed irrigation systems and converted Mesopotamia into a desert. “Already a U.N. report concludes that Iraq has been bombed back to the ‘pre-industrial age,’ its infrastructure destroyed, its people beset by famine and disease.”5

5. Tom Wicker, New York Times, April 3, 1991.

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I prayed for the people and I prayed for food, water, electricity, and I prayed for the museums, that our history not be obliterated into a footnote of rubble. “It was a great sight—all those fireworks, like Christmas,” said a U.S. airman. The tank was running out of gas and the planes kept coming and everyone was running and I prayed to Allah that I not be burned in the tank and we were just like everyone else, scared and running like the people on the road, running to Basra. “It was a turkey shoot,” said a U.S. airman. “After the third day as I say, we knew that we had them. I mean we had closed the back door. The bridges across the Tigris and Euphrates were out. We had cut highway 8 that ran up the Tigris and Euphrates valley on this side of the river. There was no way out for them. I mean, they could go through Basra. There were a few bridges going across Al Fao to the Al Fao but there was nothing else and there was literally about to become the Battle of Cannae, a battle of annihilation.”6

6. General H. Norman Schwartzkopf, excerpt from TV interview with David Frost, published the following day in the New York Times, March 28, 1991.

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Schwartzkopf at Cannae, Schwartzkopf as Hannibal, the Carthaginian general, who stunned the Romans by a rapid march to the city. Caritas. Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.—l Corinthians 13.1. And Cato the Elder cried, “Delenda est Carthago.” Carthage must be destroyed. Carthage destroyed Tyre and ruled the Mediterranean. It warred with the Greeks and was defeated at Salamis. It fought three Punic Wars with the Romans and was destroyed. Delenda est Carthago. Madam, Saddam Hussein is mad, bad, and dangerous to know.7 A Hitler.8 (Have I no friend will rid me of this living fear?9 His soldiers? his generals? his people? The Kurds? The Shi’ites? Rambo?) Saddam Hussein must not remain to retain his domain. He must eat the Breakfast of Humiliations. And yet, if his neighbors come nibbling at his table they may elect to dine well, so let his helicopter blades

7. Written of George Gordon, Lord Byron, by Lady Caroline Lamb in her Journal (1812). 8. An opinion notably expressed by President George W. Bush. 9. Shakespeare, Richard II, V.iv.2.

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whip the dissidents into a mix, a sort of blend, not too crumbly, one that can hold together when pressed in the fist. This is called stabilizing the region. “Increasingly, it becomes hard to distinguish victim from victor in the gulf crisis.” . . . “What we have now is worse than what we had when Iraq was in Kuwait.”10 They want the oil But they don’t want the people. They want the oil But they don’t want the people.11 Everything ventured, chaos gained. Everything ventured, chaos gained. Feast on scorpions on jackals the petroleum-dipped tongues of politicians the excrement of bombers

10. Christine Moss Helms, Middle East scholar, New York Times, March 30, 1991, and (to Patrick E. Tyler) in the newspaper the following day. 11. Jayne Cortez, “Nigerian/American Relations,” Firespitter (New York: Bola Press, 1982).

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dropping their loads on the people. Sorties of sound and light. Fuel-bombs of flaming blood. They took everything. Who did? Enemies. They shot my father in front of us. What did this teach you? To hate them. My children will hate them and their children, also. The oil burns and will burn. The eye of the sky will glare through a tear in the ozone. (Oh-oh. The ozone.) My child is a beggar. My child is a running sore in the street. She looks for food, for water. I must find our lost family. I can hear them laughing under the rubble of our house. The planes do not stop. Why must they kill us all? “The burning wells emit a daily load of 50,000 tons of sulfur dioxide—a prime cause of acid rain—and 100,000

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tons of sooty smoke into the atmosphere. . . . Saddam Hussein . . . had plainly warned that he would do it, however; so the U.S., by its decision to launch the war anyway rather than rely on non-combat pressures, bears some responsibility. . . . the Kuwaiti well fires . . . ‘the most intense burning source, probably, in the history of the world.’”12 Meanwhile, The Country Is in a Better (or Worse) Economic Mood. Kurdish Refugee Plight Worsens. The “Star Wars” Program Will Go On. The Third World Seeks Advanced Arms. Wars Will Become More Destructive. The Baseball Season Begins. “From the overcast skies drips a greasy black rain, while sheets of gooey oil slap against a polluted shore. Burned-out hulks of twisted metal litter a landscape pockmarked by bomb craters, land mines and shallow graves scraped in the sand. . . . No one knows how long it will take to undo the damage done by the war. Most of the oil in the gulf will probably be left for nature to dispose of, a process that could take decades given the sluggish movement of the water. The job of disarming or exploding the land mines is also likely to go on for years; 50 years after World War II, people are still stumbling on mines in Egypt’s western desert.”13

12. Tom Wicker, New York Times, April 3, 1991, ending with his quotation from Joel S. Levine of NASA: “the most intense burning source, probably, in the history of the world.” 13. Joel S. Levine, Time, March 18, 1991, 37, 36.

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Pilgrim, behold Death Highway, afterwards. A road that stumbles into next year, groans into the future. Mother of Battles, pray for us now and in the hour of our devastations.

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Delivering Mail in Fallujah At the Bowery Poetry Club, on March 12, 2005, in an event hosted by Daniela Gioseffi, I dedicated the reading of this poem to Giuliana Sgrena, the Italian journalist who had written about and photographed Fallujah, had been held hostage by Iraqis for a month, and was freed on March 4. Accompanied by Nicola Calipari, the intelligence officer who negotiated her release, on the way to Baghdad Airport their car was attacked with gunfire by U.S. forces. Calipari was killed, shielding the woman with his body. On March 8, he was given a state funeral in Rome. Both Sgrena and Calipari have become national heroes. At 2:15 p.m., at the corner, I post my mail. The mailman does not pick up before that time. Sometimes I meet him at 2:30. It’s good to see him there, in uniform, a signal of my day—like having eaten oat bran in the morning, rousing my body to work right. It’s a sign of order—the slots in which I space out all my hours: morning allotted to email, work, then lunch. Broadway is wide. Today is windy. Sometimes the sky is very blue, like the time I looked down the street that clear September morning, to the cloud of incinerated bodies, whose screams and pain stained the sky and traveled uptown to be inhaled as acrid smoke.

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And so I think of Fallujah, holy ancient city of mosques and minarets, wound in a language few invaders understand as they wait, like Hulagu Khan in the thirteenth century, waiting to raze and pillage Baghdad. Today they have begun. Begun the scourging of Fallujah. Inside it is simple: think of one mother with her child, holding it against her breast, praying she won’t drop it on the earth trembling with bombardment, hoping some neighbor will protect them, terrified of sounds that deafen them, explosions that will hurl mother from child, baby from her arms, raise both of them to heaven to be blessed, then rain them back on Fallujah as blood and bones, rain them on Sunnis and Shiites and all the city— its bombed mosques and hospitals and broken water— rain them on invaders and defenders alike. And so I wonder about the mail in Fallujah. Is it waiting at a post office? Is there a post office anymore? Has it received fiery messages? Are any of them from you or me? Why would anyone send such messages? Blessed with an orderly life, I can depend on letters, bills, junk mail, occasional checks, something I want, something I fear,

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wrapped quietly in paper, with seals that can be broken, like trust going back and forth on rough roads. If I wrote a letter to Fallujah, it would have to be delivered by birds, by the wind, by my voice, singing or crying, trying to reach that dying mother with part of me, my sorrow and shame of the arms deployed to destroy her and her city, and to whom, in her ebbing life, she might yet feel a living connection.

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Bombing Blues It takes a special pain to sing the blues. —R AY MON D R .

PAT T E R SON ,

Elemental Blues

I think there is a massacre going on. Yes, I think there is a massacre going on. Small puffs of smoke are veiling the bombers’ harm you’ve done. You can’t hear any screaming or any human cry You can’t hear any curse or prayer. Your plane is up too high. The terror you’re inspiring will haunt you by and by. Will shame you by and by. And we are up there with you bought your speed and place among the mighty minions of violence and disgrace. Bought your fiery station in violence and disgrace. Young people blow themselves up to make their bodies speak. Break up into ruddy sparks to let their bodies speak. They heard that right is mighty, saw earth inherit the meek.

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Pray to the spirit of Gandhi, of Martin Luther King. May all the gods of Mercy steady each heart to sing of justice, peace, and wisdom laboring faith can bring. Justice, peace, and wisdom common love can bring.

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Suicide Bomber (2001, 2009) “I looked him in the eye and he blew himself up,” said Lior Kamissa, who was checking shoppers’ bags, from his hospital bed. “I didn’t see him push a button, nothing. He just exploded and disappeared. I saw big fire coming from this man, and smoke.” —ABCNews.com, May 18, 2001

Mahmoud Ahmed Marmash, 20 years old, grocery store clerk. Videotape unwound your furies. Drillmasters programmed your body as if vengeance could stem losses repair someone fragile you knew, like the baby Iman Hejjo, four months old, “whose death shook my conscience and being.” You wore a green headband and carried an M-16 assault rifle, announcing you too could murder in style. What do you see as you and the guard, silhouettes of centuries, look at each other? You could be Cain judging Abel or a cave man lifting a rock to bash a skull spewing brains to drench the efficient future its body parts escaping battlefields

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into houses markets schools hospitals while the splattering sky rains grief on Earth and raises its roiling oceans of blood. This minute: Strangers in the souk, children in tow. Your parents at home awaiting you. As the wall of years rose higher you fled its flesh-imprisoned phosphorous its crematorial villages its streets wild with sewage and blood. You could no longer wait or believe that survival was dignity.

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Just Breathing This worldwound body politic quivers with torture—earthshock— (Can you match the arms and legs?) (Can you sew them back together?) (Can you resurrect a country?) And what were you doing across the globe, invading those you did not know who never invaded you? You raged across bones and borders as if collective guilt caught criminals. (What feral law is that?) What were you doing there, just breathing? O breath powerful breath baited with cash without consequence (you thought) to you. Shock by trigger by primers of hate of anonymous enemies whose language you do not speak whose culture you cartoon enemies behind each door enemies who were not enemies till you smashed their light and water crushed them in their homes tormented them.

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You were aware and stood there by the door kicked in to invade a family. Everybody inside was bleeding. You were breathing. Will this mother’s child have breath if it is born? It is not safe in the womb in a house in a mosque a market a hospital. Let it not be born— world unworthy of a single birth— until the bombing stops. Until it stops and infants nurse at the future. Meanwhile, you and I are standing in the daily dust and rubble, the museum of death and dying, just breathing.

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Some Questions for a Missile When a missile leaves its cradle does someone pat it and say, “Good missile, do your work,” pleased with the shape and weight of pain? Does it matter to its maker what it hits? If, with all due precision, it heads for buildings, explodes people? Like that pregnant woman buying rice in an open market. Did impact liberate her space/time deconstruct her body into screams? I think that woman’s screams are embedded in air, like the bodies at Hiroshima whose memorial shadows imprint the ground, screams tearing the throats of dying soldiers who call to their mothers, screams melding with hungry weapons that eat them, screams that leave a bitter haze through which, day after day after day we taste them.

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Artillerymen in the Shower Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 19151 I did not want to go there. I do not want to be here. Fourteen pallid young men, nude, flank a tall round stove that heats water for the shower. Their captain, poised in a uniform stands in tall boots, observes from canvas right. The artillerymen receive frail water. They seem to console each other. Furnace opens its jaws to dampness, to tears buried in throats, to wails in the mind that cannot move past eyelids and slumping or huddled figures recoiling from warm water they confront like their own tears dropping from shower heads, poised in a row of gallows above them. The artillerymen have red hands (dipped in blood of the dying?) and red feet (steeped in blood of the dead?). This painting groans.

1. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Retrospective Exhibition, May 2003, at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., painting on loan from the Guggenheim Museum, New York City.

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Nazis shouted, “Degenerate Art!” Killed your six hundred thirty-nine works. You killed yourself. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: You bled the war you could not bear, the broken stumbling through slush bodies. You simplify: One must refuse. One must refuse. I did not want to go there. I do not want to be here. “If need be, I shall sacrifice my life for art.”

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Hecuba to Hector Ah, Hector—blood pools thickly in the eyes and honor, power, prowess blinds with lust! If not for Pandarus and the gods, this tide could well have ebbed to foolish origins, to Paris and Menelaus grappling in single combat over Helen, ending the nine-year siege. War is a serpent— spews venom on the young. Be Hector in peace, the tamer of horses! Your glittering helmet trails its golden plume of horsehair, dazzles the eye, kills mightily with sword and spear. But helmet, armor, shield will bend, brave son whom I raised, step by step, like an eagle climbing the air. Remember your wife and child. Remember Andromache. Glory hews a marble bed and serves a phantom porridge. Little Scamandrius at each hand of height will curse his orphan’s tears. “War is men’s business,” you say. What then is women’s? To tend the funeral pyres and whitened bones? To pluck the lyres of lamentation? I should have rent my breasts before they suckled you or any of my sons. Do not, I pray, go out to meet Achilles. Fight from within these walls. And yet you go—and yet our grief runs with you out the gate.

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Service for the Dead In Vereschagin’s giant canvas priest on a promontory gazes at earth. Free of their battlefield a regiment of pale soldiers lies at his feet. Military officer with red epaulets stands behind him. A solitary cross leans against the rise. The priest wears a black robe edged with silvery gold. He lifts a censer to fragrance the dead. The officer is holding a Bible. In the foreground a soldier, headless, focuses companions who drift endlessly into distance like dust, like clouds, like the plains of Russia. The wounded sky trails after them its carcass of light.

Vasily Vereschagin’s Defeated: Service for the Dead, painting exhibited in Guggenheim Museum’s “Russia!” exhibition, New York City, fall 2005.

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For Gaza Babies die mothers moan parents muted children cry Words crawl to books (covers are folding small insect wings) cower in lexicons forage for meaning fugitive fugitive borders are closed Weighted by tear-load words can’t go far bombs bare steel teeth to phosphorous flames parsing the wailing pages of flesh Burned into shrill memorial air

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Variations on a Theme by Andrea Mantegna I . PA L L A S E X P E L L I N G T H E V I C E S FROM THE GA R DEN OF V IRT UE1

In a garden (not Eve’s, not Adam’s, but like theirs, unmarred by history), marked by eleven arches, four focusing a low lattice fence that retains rose bushes escaping to climb and cluster at the top between the curves, a stone wall on the right defies time, which enters vigorously from the left: Pallas Athena, one hand clasping the shaft of a broken spear; the other raising her shield against a swarm of armed cupids. Helmeted, splendid in red, gold, white, and blue, she bursts through the arch. Clothed and unclothed figures scatter. Some flee on land; others through stagnant waters of a swamp moat. Avarice, a lean woman with spear-like breasts, leads the flight of Vices through the swamp. She and Ingratitude carry the fat, crowned figure of Ignorance. Behind them a satyr clasps an infant and a bearskin. In the foreground, a monkeylike hermaphrodite, Immortal Hatred, Fraud, and Malice, looks back fearfully at Athena as he clutches 1. A painting (1499–1502) by Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506), from the Musée du Louvre, Paris, shown in an exhibition of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 7–July 12, 1992.

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his four seedbags of evil. Idleness, armless, naked, is pulled along with a rope by tatterdemalion Sloth. Venus, off-center, her scant green scarf billowing about her, stands on the back of a centaur, while ahead, Cupid raises his torches of love. Two women in green and blue, who carry a bow (Diana?) and an extinguished torch (of Chastity?) lead the approach to Venus. Tall as an arch, transforming into a tree with upraised branches, a greenish figure cries to the turbulent sky: “Come, divine companions of the virtues, who are returning to us from Heaven, banish these foul monsters of vice from our seats.” In a fleecy mandorla of clouds hover Temperance, who waters down her wine, Justice, with her scales and sword, and Fortitude, who holds a column and club and wears Hercules’ lion skin. Below, immured in the garden wall, Prudence releases a little banderola, urging, in Latin, “And you, oh gods, succor me, the mother of virtues.” I I. CH R ISTOPH ER COLU M BUS

And somewhere in Mantegna’s time, Cristoforo Colombo, a virtuous gentleman of Genoa, was going ashore in San Salvador, in the Bahamas, to take possession of Arawak land for Castile.

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“To win their friendship, and realizing that here was a people to be converted to our Holy Faith by love and friendship and not by force, I gave some of them red caps, glass beads, and many other little things. These pleased them very much and they became very friendly. They later swam out to the ship’s boats in which we were seated, and brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears. . . . They willingly traded everything they owned. But they seemed to me a poor people . . . naked. . . . Both men and women cried, ‘Come and see the men who have come from heaven, and bring them food and water.’ . . . Should your Majesties command it, all the inhabitants could be taken away to Castile, or made slaves on the island.” And when the Santa Maria foundered on a reef off Haiti, Guacanagari, the local chief or cacique, who had already met Columbus and sent him presents, including a gold mask, hearing of the misfortune, wept, “and sent me various of his relatives to implore me not to grieve, for he would give me everything he had.”2 The Santa Maria ran aground on Christmas. Wrenched, from its wounded timbers honoring Jesus’ mother: Fort Navidad. Arawaks, newly enslaved, lifted hosannas of pain into its walls. Columbus planted his sailors like flags claiming the land for the rulers of Spain.

2. Hans Koning, Columbus: His Enterprise; Exploding the Myth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1991), 51–53, 57. The information in section II draws chiefly from this book. Quotations here are from Columbus’s log, as they are taken from Friar (later Bishop) Bartolomé de las Casas, History of the Indies.

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On the Niña, Columbus gathered the rest of his crew. He rounded up the sample Arawak slaves and fired the lombard at the carcass hull of his foundered ship, the Santa Maria, and set sail. Across the Atlantic, weather turning cold, the caravels leaked and shivering prisoners died. Week after week of anguish staggered on from phantom shores they thought that they had reached: the Way, the Truth of passage to the East, the gilded route to Orient gold, Cathay. The turbulent journey over, in triumph Columbus entered Barcelona. Six surviving Indians walked behind in feathers and little aprons, walked in the chilly air, waded through roaring mouths and glittering eyes. Admiral Columbus, hail! Portugal, Spain, blessed by the Pope, divided the spoils of the world. And so unleashed the snarling hunt for gold. Seventeen ships, with fifteen hundred men set out to conquer savages. Arrived at quiet Navidad. And waited. Fearfully men from the villages of Guacanagari visited by night, with gifts. The admiral learned that the colony men had roamed the island in gangs, looking for gold and raping the women, and each of the colony men had been captured and killed. Now the Indians were made to surrender their golden ornaments, and every day

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they washed the gold dust from the streams, as tribute to buy a three-month copper coin. Without it hands were hacked off, and they bled to death. Their pacification intact, the suicides began en masse. By 1540, Arawaks collapsed into archaeology. And still there was no gold. There was no gold. No gold. III. VI NCEN NES

On July 3, 1988, an American warship shot down an Iranian airliner, killing 290 civilians. . . . The Pentagon tried to cover the tragic blunder. —“Sea of Lies,” Newsweek, July 13, 1992

Burst into burning blood came screaming down into the Persian Gulf and doubly drowned in a sea of lies. The antiaircraft missiles launched into a yellow haze of sand from the Arabian desert, and the combat information center lights dimmed “like a prison’s during an execution.”3 “I made the proper decision,” said Captain Rogers, retiring to his cabin aboard the Vincennes.

3. John Barry and Roger Charles, “The Vincennes Tragedy: A Sea of Lies,” Newsweek, July 13, 1992, 28–39. Information in section III relies heavily on this report; the apt simile here appears on page 38. A Nightline (ABC-TV) account, which included an interview with Captain Rogers, was also useful.

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It was hot and the captain was shaving. The frigate Montgomery, escorting Kuwaiti tankers registered under the U.S. flag to keep the oil flowing, had spotted thirteen Iranian gunboats in the Strait of Hormuz, milling about a Liberian tanker, the Stoval. Somebody heard “explosions.” Captain Rogers, on orders, sent a helicopter to inspect, but in addition sent a blast through the klaxon rushing his crew to man their battle stations, and moved the ship north to Iranian waters. Omanis ordered Iranian gunboats to leave. Omanis ordered the warship Vincennes to leave. Captain McKenna, chief of surface warfare, also ordered the Vincennes to leave. Helicopter trailed the gunboats north, took antiaircraft fire. The Vincennes moved north again, engaged Iranian gunboats within their twelve-mile territorial limit. Iran Air captain Mohsen Rezaian announced to the tower at Bandar Abbas Airport that he was ready for takeoff. Lifted the plane into the haze, unknowingly, over the Vincennes. Wearing his jaunty gold-encrusted cap, Captain Rogers, flanked by battle managers, sat upright in the womb of his cockpit at the darkened combat information center, the windowless combat information center, and directed warfare by remote control. The $400,000,000 Aegis computer,

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with its four 42-inch-square screens relaying to rows of operators, each one studying an element of the battle monitored on separate radio consoles, the Aegis computer can track every aircraft within 300 miles, identify them as friendly or hostile, display their direction and speed, rank them by danger. Flight 655, picked up on radar, was classified as commercial, but was missed by the petty officer on his list. A decision was passed along, part “friction” mixed with fear.4 Innocent aircraft in ascent perceived as hostile, in descent. Two SMZs shot into the haze. Captain Rezaian heard none of the warnings, reported he had reached his first checkpoint. “Have a nice day,” the tower radioed. A missile blew off the plane’s left wing. Enormous span with engine pod attached, it fell like Icarus into the sea. On the Montgomery, crewmen gaped in awe as Zeus rained blood and fragments of the sky. Turning about, the Vincennes left Iranian waters.

4. “Military theorists write about ‘friction,’ the inevitability of error, accident, and miscalculation in the stress of combat” (Newsweek, ibid., 36).

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The U.S. Navy claimed that the warship Vincennes had sped to defend the Stoval, an unarmed merchant ship. But that ship, a decoy to lure enemy gunboats into international waters, was a simulacrum of radio transmissions, a Pentagon experiment. The Stoval existed merely on a computer screen. I V. E P I L O G U E

Pale against green water, face down, face up, bodies of women, men, and children float their quiet screams in the Persian Gulf past naked Arawaks, thrown overboard past sailors drowned in long-forgotten wars. All bodies drowned may pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Pallas Athena is chasing the Vices: Avarice, Envy, Sloth, Fraud, and Ignorance wade in petroleum oil that thickens the sea. Athena drops her broken spear and doffs her helmet brimming with golden grain to feed new life to the dead and to the living, while she guides their spirits toward the Garden of Virtue where Vices thrash about in a swamp below the soaring, rose-topped hedges bordering the garden and a low, compassionate sky.

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