I wonder what you people will make of this.
The Patriot
*Bethesda, Maryland; October, 2001*
Next weekend, unless cancelled, the Art Fair.
Today the usual
between the Barnes & Noble and the Safeway:
yuppies and aging yuppies with cellphones and dogs,
concerned mothers,
one child who embarks on a rage so shrill and detailed
she may remember it,
three dogs who entangle their leashes, not in anger
or lust (it may be too late
in the year for sex), but the mere joy
of meeting,
owners intent on their cellphones
as the market retakes 9000,
some obviously upper-middle-class,
subdued African-Americans
entering Thai Seafood,
four blond airheads
whose shrieks, when our paths first cross
near Chicken-on-the-Run,
sound cruel, at someone's expense, but
later, by the expensive clothing store,
self-sustaining, neutral,
one cop,
and here and there, that face, as self-
enclosed as the others,
though now, in the first week of bombing,
less so, like others;
perhaps at the middling used bookstore
(the only one in the area) -
vocation, alienation,
a separate peace
upon that face like a brand.
I wish that Sharon would remove the settlements,
I wish Iraq were not blockaded ...
As I walk and think, pages enter
the expanding ragged notebook
of the future,
and as I continue to walk
whole chapters become paragraphs
and paragraphs, footnotes;
I wonder when, under attack,
these people will blame Jews.
They haven't, yet,
and I imagine,
in my endless nervous study of perspective,
a paleoconservative
here: his loathing of amorality, his half-admitted
delight in people's fear,
a libertarian
ritually praising their self-fulfillment in commerce -
before I return
to my usual leftist sense
of their mystery
and faded grief that it should be a mystery.
Then I experiment,
for the first time in my life, with a flag pin,
with a special sense of "you," and with blessings:
blessings upon your oil, your proxies,
your brave soldiers,
you who allowed me to exist.
|