Blackboard


1

The emotions a given era
gives rise to, or vice versa,
are not what you casually call
emotions.  “Love,” etc.  Consider
your reaction to these lines,
their pretentiousness, the excessive
claim they make on you, their spoor
of philosophizing for its own sake
that makes you whinny like a shying horse –
is it “fear”?  Simply that?
Or “disgust”?  Or that sense
you have for a moment
of entrapment,
of infinitely self-reflecting mirrors:
me anticipating your responses,
you evading my anticipation,
me anticipating your evasion – that’s *time
you see, the times
scarring, piercing the hull of poetry.

The emotions a given era
gives rise to, or vice versa
are Weakly Interacting Massive Particles –
wimps.  They’re slow
and cold.  They have weight but no light,
and vastly outnumber
the shiny emotions we name
that cleave to and are structured by them,
the way dark matter seeds the galaxies,
until escaping Time tears them asunder.

2

February; mid-seventies.  Can one speak,
still, of “unseasonal” warmth?
For the moment the trees hesitate,
still, to bud, and the mansions
beyond and above them – flagstone, Georgian,
Cape Cod, one timid modern –
are visible, and, as always, dark in daylight.
– *We work, you know.  We work hard.*  You own,
which lightens the burden. – I have
so few thoughts of my own,
so little imaginative agenda
these days that voices
ascribable to them break through,
trying to prove they’re human, lonely: *My boy
has been moved to the head office!
The dog’s dying.
She’ll get this house; the downtown place
is enough for me, and more convenient.
My girl has married another
damned gold-digger, but this one’s
at least manageable.  I’m dying. – *
You must be very proud, or sad,
I send.  They don’t respond; they aren’t there,
and will not notice
if I write what I usually hear:
*To achieve each new level
of safety and power
is like the triumph of an athlete,
freeing one for a time from past and future.
Have you any idea what that’s like?
We feel sorry for you if you don’t.*

One type of tree in this park
doesn’t drop its leaves in fall;
they rest like curling yellow texts
in an alien library
with different filing methods.
Saying perhaps that at least
Romanticism is dead:
that from now on trees and creatures
will suffer their way, you in yours,
with only, so to speak, official contacts.
As I watch, inexplicably
(there’s no breeze) one dry leaf
coasts to the dry creekbed.
Spring will come, hiding those houses,
and I’ll walk here again
with a mobile pale-green dome around my head.

3

In *Man in the Modern Age* (1930)
Jaspers says that we
each have a steel-walled cell deep in our minds
where we keep what we love.
(I may have used this reference
in a poem years ago;
too hard to check.  And if so
it demonstrates his point.)
It may be a person, a memory,
a fetish or ideal;
what counts is that we feel
reassured, visiting it,
of love and our capacity for love,
so that we may, again locking the door
and returning to the surface, kill and kill.
But what if we let it go?
She hesitates.  You tell her
where the stairs are, the elevator.
She runs out.  You remain
or leave – it doesn’t matter.
Eventually the enemy comes
to check out these levels.
They notice you, inert as you are, and do
to you what in ’01 the Taliban
did to the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

4

Absurd – an atheist Jew
highlighting biblical quotations
like this one from Revelations
in the book I’m explaining to
the bipolar girl.  One letter
about her, from
the University Health Office
at the beginning of term; then nothing,
no guidance.  Walking on eggshells.
Of course she has read nothing
in school or church (she did quite a lot
of church).  Is now a sophomore
with meds unbalanced, determination
fraying, a tear always
about to fall, irrelevant perky comments.
I’ll take as long as it needs
to explain to her what this story
is doing.  Hers was the last class
of the day in this room
with its broken ceiling tiles, bad lights
and missing thermostat.  Outside,
her cohort passes, preparing
to party.  It’s a party school.
(Last term we lost three
to drugs and suicide.)  Its strength
is not, needless to say,
the humanities, but bus-ed.
I recognize some of the passing
kids – gung-ho, empire-builders,
world-beaters, out for Number One, with
the shakes on Mondays; others
conventionally glum; both
as bored, beneath it all, as this girl.
(Boredom, I almost said
in class, reveals eternity to us,
the real one, which no one wants to see.)
But the quiet kids outside will be
the successful ones.  Will stop
bullets, accept layoffs
or promotion and command
out of boredom.  Be good,
be parents, monitor their kids’ meds,
believing in none of it.
*And the name of the star is called Wormwood.*