bloomsite: 201105

20110528

Gods in the Earth

The sky, transparent, runs away forever. The seas
of the world are infinite, wrapping all around this
garden of a globe. The multi-colored stars like hard gems
howl in the hungry and eager night, wailing over
hot jungles or soaring blue-gray rocky crosscut saw teeth
far above a straight-edge tree line, or outside skyscraper
windows where the winds blow hardy but impotent,
or above summer convertibles that barrel down desert
diamond highways between nests of neon with noisy
air conditioning units jutting from caulk-rotted windows,
clutching at wildly desirous hearts. The voices, the songs
of the hordes ring on, ring on down stainless steel
American corridors constructed at sharply acute angles
through brilliantly fluorescing fogs of time. I know
the cool clarity of light when the day is fading, or in
the morning before the sun is risen. I know the open
prairies and their frigid and silvery streams that run on
no matter which side has won the election, or the war.
I know the deer that start under the eaves that we
never see, and the tail-twitchy skittering of gray squirrels.
I know the bones interred as sacred relics of the dance
of genes down ten thousand generations, and how
the sweat dripped down to water the lands. The poor
history that's written down is the least memoir
of these heroic, immortal collisions of good fortune
and catastrophe. I know we are all gods in the earth
whose ears are stopped and eyes plucked out, hypnotized
by colorful turning motion and car chases and cheap,
flashing mirrors and white sandy beach bathing scenes
and other authorized ornamentation, and I'm not perturbed.
I know the brown sparrows and fuzzy caterpillars that watch
from thin branches, gone after a season, but always returning,
again and again.

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20110507

Washington, DC & Eastern Theater Trip

20110504

Although Defeated, You Did Not Fail

Although defeated, you did not fail:
You succeeded, and we're all your descendants.
You could not know your first principles were fatally flawed,
your cause unjust. But the legacy you left to us shines
down recurring corridors of forgotten years, in dark
corners and along splitting seams like glittering stars
illuminating our uncertain steps in spurring dreams,
guiding us on, reminding us to dare to reach inside
for selves just a little better than these shabby ones
we routinely wear.

This land is not by far the one you sought, and none
you could recognize. Your eyes might well blur with tears,
and yet I would that you could set aside regret and know,
for all the flaws and moral lapses you'd instantly recognize
and abhor, your children hold none in higher esteem than thee.
Thy memory informs the mystic river from whence the proud
and loyal drink on either shore. For behold! the splintered bones
reknit and forged anew a single nation under God which,
to no small extent because of you and the terrible burdens
which you bore, shall nevermore perish from the Earth.

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20110503

UBL is Dead

That son of a bitch.

Once in fifty years, in a hundred years, a shock
jolts the system, and nothing's
ever the same again. I know you don't

see it that way. It's not because
you're young now; it's because you were
too young then, no more than a child who could not
guess what the Pentagon was, or find Pennsylvania
on a map, or even New York, much less Afghanistan.
I know because, remembering when I was your age,
I would have thought, I'm certain, not so very differently
than you. So I won't talk down to you, or preach, or assume
a paternalistic pose. I don't judge you. I don't even disagree.
How could I? But will you do the same for me?

After that
TERRIBLE DAY
this

natural-born liberal could not
hear the Star Spangled Banner for years without
choking up (I, who had never been a patriot any more
than you feel yourself to be a patriot; I, who was
equally suspicious as you are suspicious of patriots who blindly
follow the flag into national destruction); could not
sleep without the radio on and tuned to NPR,
jazz through the night, just in case another
catastrophe should be announced. Listening
to music became not disrespectful but trite, and for
six years music was blotted from my world.
Some of us who were not ten years old were changed
in ways you never saw and haven't understood,
because you couldn't. The parents
you know now are not the people they were on
September 10th. We all became
different people that day, not better people,
our lifelong sang-froid crippled in moments,
never to rise again. We can only

operate within the moment; our emotions
are geared to the now. But nor time nor life
are thus comprised, and human memories
degrade with predictable rapidity, here today,
gone within a week. Time is not this little bubble
around ourselves and our acquaintances; time
is a mighty river in flood, pushing us forward like chips
bobbing helplessly along, and I hope someday
you'll see that on one bright sunny morning that river
was shunted violently aside to find strange new banks
and waterways for which none of us had planned,
and whatever life you would have known, should have known,
was brutally stolen from you by an evil man. That was the childhood
you were supposed to have had; those were the parents
you were supposed to have known: gone. That world,
five decades in the making, collapsed. Fallen into gray ash,
beyond all recovery in those horrifying moments
when the towers fell.

Something was cut out of my soul that
only now do I believe may come back again; the same
something that was removed from your soul, and you don't
even know it yet, because you never
learned how to miss it.

And I hope you're never
transformed into a patriot this way.

Now that son of a bitch is dead. And I
believe in God, and I consider myself a Christian, and I
celebrate and respect thinking and devout
Buddhists and Muslims and Arabs and Jews, and I
respect agnostics and atheists too.
And I believe in freedom and democracy,
And I believe in Truth.
God bless America.
God bless this whole world.

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