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
>
>
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> Under
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>
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