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I can't help but feel that all this talk of"American imperialism" conceals a kind of yearning ... which became one (though only one) of the subjects of this poem. The Strangest Guest 1 I suppose the secret of pain is to regard whatever isn't as blessed. Imagine you're being held underwater by some particularly cruel hitman. The sky you can see, inches away, is the most gorgeous, the landscape paradise - and suddenly the meaty hand is gone. Imagine. Whatever inanity filters through headache or nausea is the sublimest tender word; the feel of frayed terrycloth, infinitely soft. You live, in any part that doesn't hurt, as Christ and Buddha suggested … (but really there's no secret). 2 The guys who are doing the cleanup, like the contractors, subcontractors and crews, seem of the same homogenized stock as the ones they are, uh, resettling: brown, squat, and noseless. Natives don't see natives from even the next village as natives, and certainly don't see natives who appear in their village in uniform to kill them as natives, and *those natives etc. It's useful. The land and sky are clearing. The woods and weeds, the lyric prairie grasses return. Salmon … Coral invests new reefs of concrete and asphalt. Astonishing wildflowers surge over bone-fertilized meadows. These guys must know that when their jobs are finished they are, but I guess as long as the union exists, it will deal. Still, who's in charge here? Buildings replacing a few suburbs have that thatch-roofed, fluted, narrow leaded windowed Middle-Earth look … Damn pointy-ears will creep in anywhere. 3 She was never the same after Salinger in the Glass novels called her God. She ate and ate, neared 300, said it was glandular. It was. A horror of glands, clottings and cloggings, vicious synapses, a mind swift to evade … The name of the mouth is life, but its meat is death. She sat in Wendy's eating three low-fat bran muffins, her buried wrists delicate, her face unlined, and reading a small square book, brightly-colored, with extensive ornament around the few words on each page, their substance peace and forgiveness. 4 I recite, after the padre finishes with them. You'd think they'd resent the time, but no: the easy, meditative at-ease, the eyes neither fixed nor restless, reveal the warrior. The Fifth Fighter Wing. Aboard the *Wyoming. Men of the Twelfth Division, and so on. When they die, I consult with whatever officer sends their effects home, and get to know them. Am last ashore, with the perk of walking between signs that advertise minefields, and heaps of metal I must get to know, in moonlight and solitude to where our flag flies over mosques, and larger and larger mosques, and the great mosques, over palaces and aqueducts and onion domes, over Khartoum and Ougadougou, over the Great Wall, mold-smelling ruins, over Balmoral Castle, over the vast disheartened middens of the East. All these appear in my poems, which sell. I greet the President when I go home, then drive prioritized streets to meet with my friends, who do not like me any more though I like them and am thus pathetic though not as pathetic as they, who await a knock at the door. I stare expressively at nothing and compare my situation to Drieu la Rochelle's in 1940 … but the obscure reference and implied historicism bring only the stiff mouths and white-showing eyes of righteousness. As in that Nazi movie "Furlough on Parole," one prefers the company of soldiers, and piles of corpses who failed beneath the moon to take our positions. Some of our boys and fierce girls doubt but most, those nights, achieve (though they have only my word for it) the true innocence. Beyond taxes and oil, it is this that preciously flows home to us. Don't keep me from it, or it from me. Bomb Baghdad. 5 The disastrous miscalculation of the later Star Wars films (two out to date) is not that videogame geeks preempted plot, or the Maxfield Parrish backdrops or leaden women, but the drive towards the moment when the young Darth Vader meets and helps the Emperor into power. The Emperor is evil. They never met. The Emperor was always there for Vader, Vader for him. To give people the idea (insofar as entertainment gives them ideas) of a meeting is to suggest that evil is not transcendent fact but a matter of choice, a motive. And the results could be terrible, because the masses themselves have motives. Insofar as "choice" exists, or "evil," you never, never know when you chose evil. 6 As his bullet enters his brain, Vladimir Vladimirovich relaxes. The Parisian smell of Lili Brik, her intense though self-absorbed gaze, and certain sounds will follow him forever through the gas and coal-dust of the afterlife, which is a city much like Moscow; but for now he drifts through the decades. Doesn't return to France and her (and the rich, useless husband) but hangs like extra gloom around Stalin. Sees him write, "Mayakovsky was the finest poet we have yet produced. Indifference to his memory and work is a crime." And sees the statue rise on Mayakovsky Square, and whispers in the Boss's ear, "I saved you the trouble with my own Colt revolver, Georgian dog." During the Purges, he meets the souls of many friends emerging blinking from the Lyubyanka or from ghost-expresses from the East - waving champagne; there are years of champagne and kisses and reunion. When the Germans come, he cries at last the generous impotent tears of the dead. Postwar displacements drop him in a drainage ditch near Mecklenburg, aimlessly contemplating (it happens). T-51s exploding through Fulda Gap to begin World War III rouse him, which creates enough of a vortex that they don't. Mayakovsky decides to seek out a New World. He likes the buildings for a while, and Negroes, and jazz, but the absence of class consciousness bugs him. Into this void the Poem rises, floating free of author, meaning, syntax - it is not very interesting but, losing himself, he watches it and its investors sneaking a fist up the anus of language. Amused and disgusted, thinking of home, wherever that is (by now the towers of Moscow gleam with signs purveying perfume and diamonds to gangsters and whores), he finds himself remembering his youth: the yellow shirt of Dadaist Cubofuturist whatever, and his fancy of leaping off a bridge into the Neva, crying "DRINK VAN HOUTEN'S COCOA!!" Perhaps a better end, he thinks (somewhat diffusely) than others: It was a dream. They lived happily ever after. Th-th-th-that's all, folks.