The Sword


1

I couldn’t tell them they were stupid.
Some maternal imperative
forbade.  Now if I had been told,
it occurred to me later, A day will come
when you too will be slow, ill-read,
fearful and inept with new
technology, excessive about babies,
insistent, repetitive, maundering;
or You must learn that reality
is a narrow jagged despairing
caecum, not the endless glad
expansion of the self, and you must learn it
desperately soon, and this is how you learn;
or, in the rhythms of another class,
You’re eating these people’s food,
enjoying their smelly warmth, and therefore
everything agrees with you and you agree
with everything, I wouldn’t
have agreed: I would have shaped
one beautiful pure silent
hate and become it, as I did anyway, but
at least it would have been for an *idea.
Instead it was precisely
ideas and their articulation that
were barred, what I felt
impossible to be felt and thus
not having been.  Eventually I learned
a modicum of diplomacy, i.e.,
a mutually painless sloughing off
of fools; how to locate
points of interest in discourses
with none; the ineradicable
distaste behind the gilded shuttered
eyes of the compassionate Buddha.

2

In my mind he wears the familiar
metallic smile that admits, forgets,
and offers nothing, the head as always
to one side.  In my mind,
but only there, he’s cornered.
Looks at his watch as if to say
*Art – the smile holds – *may be timeless
but I have things to do*.
The same things.  Five terms in Congress,
Defense, CEO, Vice-President,
the National Energy Policy Development Group,
the Project for a New American Century – these things
are life.  Life is resumés.  And from the look
of the cell where I’ve put him he can tell
I have none; it is a kind of nothingness.
There will be no trial,
let alone torture – these things don’t happen –
and history, which always ultimately
governs from the center, will automatically
pardon.  Death is a consequence
of a weak heart; but the act
of power, repeated and endlessly savored,
carries one over, is itself heaven.
*Even as you write* – the laugh
is surprisingly genial and boyish – *I am being forgotten*.

3

A philosopher who thought
of signing the petition to boycott
Israeli universities is *there.  Under protest,
as it were: the hipness, cleanness, art-walls,
buzz of the place are at the expense
of people deprived of (their) land
and medical care, made to wait in long lines,
beaten, etc.  (The same could be said
of any café in the West, but that makes it worse
here.)  And the tank-tops, flip-flops,
and general tough sexiness only
make the visitor hope
these kids feel somehow guilty.
In large part they do: they’re students
at the university where he has come
to talk about Values (in a New
Millennium, in Crisis, etc.).  He’s doing it now,
at a table with local profs whose endless
“ehhhhhhhhhhhhh” at every hesitation
annoys him: it seems either
to insist on, or refuse, closure.
A Foucauldian fondly derides
a self-confessed “secular Talmudist”; both strike
the visitor as provincial.  Outside
a boy guns a van
across the square and into the café.
His family, spread among Gaza, Amman,
and Long Beach, has money; he studied awhile,
but found nothing worth his candle
except the promised virgins and the prayer
he shouts as he detonates.
The thesis of one scattered prof abides:
There are no values.  There are only sides.

4

For the rare blessed, the light
that we in self-defense call beautiful
doesn’t hurt at evening.  Seems less –
as time itself is less than destiny –
than love they hurtle towards, than happiness.
But if the years, whether long or short,
have done their common work, you stand
by a high office window-wall and plot
distress for those below.  Inadvertently,
it may be – you may wish them well,
or even intend good, but what are intentions?
Wanting at all costs not to dissolve
in that light, nor hear its single comment.
Faxes, phones, the bell
that announces email drown it out;
the grateful glare of ceiling tiles is brighter;
and people on the pavement scatter
to offices serving yours, or at worst
from police and soldiers summoned at your call.
Imagining you once stood
beneath a castle wall with men
whose methods were direct, were yours, beside you,
the morbid hour merely a delay
before night’s battle and triumphant day,
you know the light was always there – is pain,
free of the dead and seeking you again.