Outstanding!
- Peter
On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 6:30 AM, Martin Walker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> What a poem to wake up to. Of course, it isn't a Snap in the usual
> understanding, more like a Dantean photoplay. The wordplay, the assonances
> as they interact with the rhythm & propel it - grandios, as they say in
> Germany. Only the closure at the end - prepared as it is - strikes (with me,
> right now) a slightly false note of something like "told-you-so", but
> perhaps that just joins the irony complex, as death is not what people
> ordinarily think of as "closure" at all.
> Martin
> ______________________________________________________
> Mary Devereaux: "Which is more important, corn muffins or justice?"
> Supreme Court: "Corn muffins."
> G.&I. Gershwin *Of Thee I Sing* 1931
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Larissa Shmailo" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2009 12:14 AM
> Subject: Snap: War (for C. K. Williams)
>
>
>
>>
>> War
>> For C.K. Williams
>>
>> I.
>>
>> I reread the poetry of media-drunk scribes, absorbed,
>> as they are, with young girls gyrating and the need for status
>> even among orgiasts. How they claw,
>>
>> struggling for cabs, cars, and bars, and the nod from Cerberus
>> at the door of the club, as if from him, his elicited acceptance,
>> could come entrée to it all, the whole nine circles of desire.
>>
>> But Buddha was right, and it makes for lousy verse, the cascade
>> to the fallen from fulfilled. The rituals are old, and the same rachitic
>> claw
>> reaches over us all. And so, torn, we tear, primordial as the air.
>>
>> II.
>>
>> We live in parts. The rich ones know. Their eyes caress metals,
>> held tightly to the chest, played closely to the vest, thrown stingily
>> among the just-good-folks. You won’t find the address of their factories
>>
>> at hand. "We don’t know." An igniter built in Chappaqua,
>> a pull-pin glazed in Maine, in India a shell. We need arms, military
>> muscle, American dough. Watch it blow. Skeleton, step the crack,
>>
>> payback grenade, Jack in Iraq. Shrapnel tears, moist and red. There –
>> there (he was six) there – there (she has no hand) there – there
>> (his spine is torn) there-there (her head is gone).
>>
>> III
>>
>> A small time to be alive. A very small time to be alive, short enough
>> to pretend we’ve done no harm. Thanatos is a blind-man’s bluff,
>> an ignoramus with a stake, a what-were-we-thinking?, a mistake.
>>
>> How did we not know there was really no other? How could we, eyes,
>> mouths and heart, arms, legs, all the same,truly, same, how could
>> we see anything else but we? No fire or desire, just beloved all?
>>
>> Maybe as the last breath—will we know it as last?— as the last breath
>> goes, we---will we know any we? ---we might feel another’s dying breath
>> that we might know someone else’s as we know our own death.
>> Larissa Shmailo
>>
>>
>> **************Feeling the pinch at the grocery store? Make meals for
>> Under
>> $10. (http://food.aol.com/frugal-feasts?ncid=emlcntusfood00000002)
>>
>>
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