All The Things You Are
A historian is getting me wrong.
It isn’t a biography; she’s using me
as a representative case.
Which is wrong. I can’t say why, exactly,
I think it’s a she. I’m trying
to see through her assumptions
to her century, centuries hence,
but it’s like reading surface conditions
from the bottom of a well. There seem
to be any number of genders
they can put on and take off
at will; the best I can say
is that she isn’t condescending about it.
There’s something about *food
I actually don’t want to understand,
and references to freedom I wish I could.
She seems to believe that Christian gangs
stop me every few blocks to ask
some shibboleth-question and, when I can’t answer,
beat me. – Off by a decade or two,
I hope. She has me stagger into a Starbucks
where people are coming to blows over
Serrano’s *Piss Christ*. A kid with a Mohawk
(she capitalizes) drops dead. My talk,
during a two-hour holding pattern
over National (she’s right; we never
called it “Reagan”), with someone who *could not*
understand the importance of, what was it? facts?
science? culture? never
happened as such, except in a poem.
And there are all those allusions
to an obscure plague or singer
and yet another blithering post-post-structuralist.
What’s heartening is that she seems,
after all the horrors to come, to value accuracy.
Finally I’m not sure how
the historian sees me, or what I represent.
I try – it’s hard to describe – to signal her,
to make her change her mind, but it’s difficult.
The interzone is like a well, or rather
a mineshaft, and I’m lost in it;
only my words go on ahead.
However, I’m not alone
down here. Some poor old scholar
from the circle of Diogenes of Syria
(the last pagans – see *The Uses of the Past*
by Muller), a minor Spinozist
the Inquisition got, a troubadour
too egregiously Catharist, are scraping
at different levels. We tap to each other, trying
to organize an escape route.
Like the Underground Railroad,
or the ones that got a few Jews out
(or for that matter, SS-men). Break for the surface.
It’s hard to plan, hard even to imagine,
unless that’s what death is.
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