Ars Poetica
For civic pain, poetry doesn’t do the job. I still have flesh
between my teeth from ripping into my last anti-Fascist sonnet.
And sure, blood may be the strategy of this poem
but it’s been hard to murder time until I find
a self-soothing dictum in the manner of Amos:
let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness
like an ever-flowing stream. I want to believe
ever flowing could happen, even in the land of the men in antlers
but justice bends slow in the mountains and what can I change
in me or them with the words you are reading?
I can’t contain my anger at a neighbor’s flag. I gnaw on
each mouthful of gore produced by bitter harangues,
but I hope I’ll be ready to write it down when,
in a flash, some mitigating form or language comes.
Reecho
i.
A mimic like the crow, I
respond to speech
from my language Center—
Broca’s and Wernicke’s Areas
and the angular gyrus—
like some fox in a bathtub
from a snake-hole sense of dread,
wanting to become unseen, I
speak back at you, not
in my usual drawl.
In yours.
ii
Although I know
my poems by heart,
I read them from the page
for clarity, so my mind
doesn’t wander out
through my mouth.
Folly
Every generation tells of how the good world died/ always they say it was the end/ once and for all of America.
—Jack Gilbert
In Hrastovlje, Slovenia a ruined church is decorated by a fresco that depicts skeletons—barber, mother, farmer, priest—gyrating in a Dance Macabre. The viewer is meant to recognize folly in the clatter of bones, bringing news of their extinction.
Winter sea ice, measured at its annual peak on March 22, 2025, was the “lowest it’s ever been.” Under such pressure, much of our climate communication has resolved into gaslighting.
In the 1830’s Jonathan Nelson Darby invented the idea of the Rapture. In the 1990’s Tim LaHaye cashed in on the Rapture by reaffirming the elect get out safe, a concept that obviates dying and enshrines carelessness in re our increasingly trashed planet.
Since I have seen the peeled truth of mortality and ecology, and earth’s future is to become Byron’s “lump of death,” my plan is to dance wildly and work on, oh, my God! sounding like Bless their hearts.
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