Praxis


Praxis, how I loved you.  You appear seven times,
at least, per page in the volumes of Western Marxism
and Socialist Humanism I’m selling twenty, no,
thirty years late, so that even the vast
Book Graveyard in Rockville won’t take them, if in fact
it survives.  My wife’s Uncle Mike,
the shrink, who also has to
retrench, must have the same problem
with his shelves full of moldy visionary
prepsychopharmaceutical
attempts to *analyze schizophrenia.
There’s no market for the Talking Cure
or for you, praxis, now.
Ideas like rusting factories producing
mice, like apartment buildings terminally
urined by banks and tenants, like untraceable
pensions and mortgages, like wasted educations,
like space shuttles.  So that Mike at a party
might quote Laing’s Three Rules
for the Creation of Schizophrenics (Rule One:
You absolutely must not;
Rule Two: Rule One does not exist;
Rule Three: There shall be no discussion whatever
of the existence or nonexistence
of Rules One, Two, or Three) and diffidently mumble,
They may not create schizophrenics
but they produce *something; and be looked at
with the horror and wish to be elsewhere
religious types claim
they encounter (as indeed they should).  But you, dear praxis,
don’t even receive that degree
of recognition, i.e.,
contempt.  And even I
must admit I’ve found you wanting.  Under Nixon,
for an hour a week I planned
to abandon my bourgeois self
and the vanity of art, move to Oakland, organize
workers and welfare recipients, learn to
sweat and talk football and cars while subtly
injecting class-consciousness.  Under Reagan,
an hour a month.  Under Bush
Two I signed e-petitions,
donated money, and never left
the house.  By then people once
on welfare were working four jobs and had eaten
their young, while workers
in distant jungles awaited some heavenly imam ...
Oh praxis, it’s snowing.  On Fox,
they’ll joke about global warming
and sixty million viewers
will laugh.  I could no more
explain to them that the deepening white
outside is a pledge of the desert to come
than I could clear it; but on the sand in my mind,
I croak with thirst and triumph as we burn.
Praxis, the self is a hovel,
but that doesn’t mean we want
to move.  It’s a musty gruel
that becomes the sweetest persimmon
when someone, ourselves included, asks us to share.
Near Shelley’s grave, the ashes of Gramsci
sift from his tomb beneath a corrupt
and epicene moon.  Victor Serge,
dying in a taxi, couldn’t afford
the fare and must tour Mexico City
until the traffic stops.  Rexroth wrote
his friend Jacobson that, despite Stalin, despite
McCarthy, they had been
*the happiest men alive in our day*;
and perhaps they were, but his book won’t fetch
fifty cents at the Book Graveyard.  And don’t talk to me, praxis,
about art as praxis;
I know what that amounts to.  Marcel Marceau’s
old film about a park:
the little girl, the rude little boy,
the bashful somewhat larger girl
and youth, the wistful or preoccupied
feeders of pigeons;
and he – do you see – must be all of them,
until the gates close and the last,
the old man, hobbles off with his terrible stare.