Quiet City
Beyond the cones of lamplight, the park
ruminates itself, the memory
of summer’s lovers, and childhood
monsters fondly recreated
all night by passersby. In the theater district
shows have let out, and audiences stand
silent a moment, unwilling
to relinquish images of one who may
or may not be the hero, like themselves.
Then buses come, and plazas empty
beneath loosening leaves, except
where café lights invite
unexpected necessary persons
to enter, briefly effecting
a deeper hush than that of loneliness.
Uptown, on a thousandth floor, behind infinite
drapery, a rich man reads
reports. It should be possible
secretly to open the secret valves
and rot the wiring, plumbing, bread
and lungs of those below; so that
he could walk out in his worst suit
and still be worshiped by the starving drowned.
He knows he’s dreaming. In the dream
he’s ashamed, and reconfigures
profits to benefit, without acclaim
for him, innumerable multitudes
starting tomorrow morning. Into which
he will only need to open his front door
and descend a single step.
Meanwhile his calculations float
like unheard music over unlocked houses
and tiny unlocked cars.
In sleep a million clerks and workers
turn to their wives and become satyrs
and centaurs, their wives nymphs,
their children hippogriffs and dragons
happy in feathers and claws, and the poor
spiders, coyotes, trickster-figures
of former cultures. And there are gods among them
or they are gods, and feast and toast
each other to justify
retroactively this heavy slumber.
Sated, the Minotaur renounces flesh;
even the envious Cerberus drinks and sleeps.
These Aren’t The Droids You Want
You turn away, your squad follows.
One doubts, but isn’t paid to and
will say nothing. There’s no need
to cloud obedient minds.
It’s sad how weak that white, insectile,
otherwise fearsome armor
is against laser and even projectile
weapons, let alone thoughts.
It’s designed to keep you in.
And the droids *are forgettable: they have
that sweetness civilization
has relegated to machines.
The eager fluting of one, the other
locked in its ceramic pride …
as distinctive as any
of the quasi-employed thugs
who fill this desert planet,
the usual army of facts in search of a myth.
I have drawn from a brave cylinder the image
of a Princess, to fuel
a democratic revolution
in which I will soon die.
Now I lead, without seeming to, cupidity,
vanity, growling loyalty
from one destroyed stronghold
to the next, meanwhile teaching
a backward youth some portion of detachment.
The Bagpiper
Derain, *Le Joueur de Cornemuse*, 1911
When for the first time
the townspeople heard music –
noises the stranger drew
from his unfamiliar object – they didn’t halt,
only paused, didn’t fall to their knees,
only glared. Yet they knew instantly
what it meant. It would complicate and crowd
perception, bend what had been
their straight line. Loud in a place
where only flood and fire disturbed,
it was sophisticated, putting them to shame
before imagined elsewheres.
The *doubleness of each sound
the thing made mocked
their accent and their solemn narrowness.
Its endless drone belabored them
with the Ideal. There in the square
the townspeople laid hands
on the stranger, though not on his machine:
who knew what it might
infect with its last squeal?
Backlit in a large but peeling room,
a dyspeptic pyramid
combined the powers of money, state, and church.
When the mob had brought the piper
before it and left,
it rumbled, “We serve Time.
To serve means to adhere,
not alter or anticipate.
Our method is suppression of the senses.
To buy what is sold,
despising it and self,
yet with contempt becoming habit and,
like any habit, comfort.
To love what is given:
the sour breath of another
as familiar as one’s own;
the stone wearing through centuries
of whitewash; the doubtful light.
By dawn you must be far away from here.”
But at dawn the piper stood
on a ridge outside town. Some
perplexity had slowed him,
and petulance almost changed
his sketchy moody features.
Who was (he wondered) that fat silhouette?
The *Monsieur Bertin* of Ingres, the famous
“Buddha of the Bourgeoisie,” by way
of Magritte’s Keeper of Cardboard Keys and Chalice?
I know that the secret tunnel
to paradise runs
clockwise and counterclockwise
through the walls of the world’s museums:
it’s how I travel, how I happened here.
But tyranny has no passage there;
he had no right to bid me stay or go.
And what is this children’s tale
of a town without music?
All cultures sing – at their rotting end,
they’ve little else. This isn’t an early world,
nor I created to be Orpheus.
Unless … Here he pondered
the view. It was improved
by distance. The road
behind him forked, defined
a square around a pond
or inlet of the sea.
Pollarded trees, red roofs,
and everywhere the Golden Section –
it seemed the goal of travels. Yet he knew
how killer crowds erupt
from even well-posed lanes
and won’t stop unless time is stopped.
A bird approached the birch,
expansive and knowing, beside him.
Both moved so wonderfully.
The piper primed his bag and gripped
the chanter, sighed that he must leave forever,
and put the mouthpiece to his lips and blew.
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