1
This gadget is supposed to measure
the density of being. It doesn’t work.
There may be interference.
When I factor in History, the way the
instructions say, I get readings
near zero; when I turn the knob
for Outcomes, the pointer runs off the dial.
Which means what?
That everything depends on me, on how I
position the monitor, tickle the little toggle switch?
A bit to the right
and helicopters descend, disgorging
troops so laden with armor, night-vision goggles
(it’s noon, guys) and nerve-gas detectors they’re
impressive. They’re making that “GO GO GO” noise
and spraying me on full automatic. Turn
the switch a full notch and the place stinks –
bathing has gone; we’re drinking
piss out of skulls amid rubble.
A dude in rags is giving
a sermon I could find interesting: Creation
is entirely in the hands of a lower god;
but then he points a claw at me, and I
log off. “That’s a hell of a laptop,”
says a yuppie at a nearby table,
who had thought that only software was evolving;
his envy fades as I explain.
My colleagues all buy this machine, but seldom explore
its functions. They play the video-game of feeling,
simulate how naughty
they could be, type with two fingers,
and work at home, not pretending to be in the world.
2
The days have turned warm enough –
at least on the small and shifting
prayer-rugs the sun spreads –
to let me hold conferences
on a bench in the quad.
Awaiting a student, I wonder
how long before this avuncular,
low-mimetic style dissolves
my reputation (with myself at least)
for visionary edginess,
and brands me minor.
The girl supposedly coming
seldom talks in class,
but her hard dark eyes and small pouting mouth
think. She is as frightened of her twenties
as any of her classmates
(I know from their short stories);
but not, like them, paralyzed
by nostalgia for the cartoons
and video-games of childhood.
The “next stage of her life”
seems, rather, something
to be despised and mythicized,
as oblivion is to me.
In her last story, a girl,
on the eve of her wedding
to a dull, solid cipher,
sleeps with a former,
bad-boy lover; and,
alone in the morning,
admires the bruises, purple against her pale white skin.
I gave it an A. Now she’s frightened
(she said) of poetry,
our next unit. She’s also
late. Other students are hurrying to class.
They broadcast no sense
of open horizons,
immanent power or love, or joy without drinking,
but remind me of the painting
of a girl and a shadow
Munch called “Adolescence.”
I’ve often thought it could have other titles.
It doesn’t matter if she doesn’t come.
I compose a tutorial:
There is a shaft those few
who can see dig in darkness
their whole lives long, and forget
if it’s ore they seek, or an exit;
we meet, my dear, in this tunnel.
3
A higher being has materialized
in the house of an aspiring suicide bomber.
The bomber’s adoring sisters sit on the couch,
hugging each other, each breath a gasp.
The mother hovers painfully, as always.
The father has stopped prostrating himself;
now stands by a wall, reminding
his features to look fierce, not to go slack.
For none of the verses, prayers,
spells for such an occasion
have worked; the Being is not what one expects.
No wings, no smell of myrrh (whatever that smells like);
faint tang of ozone; a featureless, sexless,
big, golden man
like an Oscar. And what it says is totally,
horribly wrong. Now it’s lecturing
about water, desertification,
Israeli technology
that could benefit the whole region
if some accommodations were made. The boy
sits upright on the good chair
beneath a photo of his brother
who killed himself and eight Marines, and posters
of other martyrs and leaders;
their beards and eyes strangely feminized,
white stallions, lightning bolts all
very Hollywood-retro – that was the Being’s first comment.
Its voice is inappropriate,
not an unctuous thunder but grating, tentative,
pensive. It describes the logistics
of the boy blowing himself up,
details of brains, balls, eyeballs
along with parts of other people spattered
around some Shi’a market. The sisters
become more hysterical.
The mother flees the room. The boy ponders
a run for the father’s pistol.
“You’re a Jew!” he screams. “You work for the CIA!”
“Of course I work for the CIA,”
says the thing. “And the FBI, NSA, NATO,
WTO“ – an endless, disdainful string.
Then it returns to its favorite
theme since it appeared: the attempt
of the inadequate,
whatever their potential cultural
resources, to escape history,
contradiction, time in some delusional
certainty. The boy begins to sing
a song about martyrs, death, God and
vengeance his brother loved. The father
joins in, coughing; then
(is it allowed?) the sisters, and even
the mother in the next room. They’re all
very moved. The higher being,
sighing inaudibly, seems to swell,
the light it generates to grow until –
like the golden glow the boy
had imagined when his bomb went off –
it absorbs and transforms them all. For reason
can only triumph by a miracle.
4
As early as his first lectures
and throughout his career, Heidegger,
closely following Rilke, invokes
worn objects, soaked in sweat and fate.
Peasant boots, wooden bowls and ladles
as opposed to impersonal, lifeless,
mass-produced, American things.
I wonder what he would have made
of my great-aunt Sophie’s dresser.
Already old in the Teens
when she probably inherited it, older
when, with a kind of prickly horror,
I saw it in the Fifties. Smelling
of powder and sachets,
perfumes and toilet water,
warm dust, but not of sun
in that room with drapes always closed.
On its top, yellowed costume jewelry,
curlers and pins, and a brush
that went many times each night
through the hair of that woman
I didn’t love.
5
In Jack Levine’s “Under the El,”
1952, the paint flickers
over the stocky bodies
of, let’s call them Morrie and Gritch
(hats, jackets; a tuba
in the pawnshop window),
and is those bodies and the light
filtering through the struts
of the El to the pawnshop world
around them, and is also
a sign of Levine’s contempt
for the Abstract Expressionists.
They have been up all night
(i.e., Morrie and Gritch,
not Pollock and Kline, though probably
they too), playing cards and drinking,
moving stolen goods, or working,
and now look, Morrie guarded,
Gritch belligerent, at you.
“I’m for Ike. He’ll work
with Joe, sort out those commie bastards.
Then we’ll be safe, and can annex the planets.”
“You know, heavy industry is leaving
this town. It’s an unintended consequence
of Roosevelt. Now that the South
has electricity, it’s moving there
among the servile crackers.” “I’m in tight
with the Union. They’ll protect me.
And my son, if I had a son,
would be rich. With a television.”
“Oh there’s lots of money around.
Those glass-walled towers going up on Park
and Madison. Capital seeking the sun,
building roads for itself. The El will go,
that tuba, pawnshops, delis with commies
jabbering in Yiddish.” “I remember a horse,
youth and a gun,
the stars, but not the details of that job.”
“You can’t regret. I learned that Inside.
Regret is another prison.” –
But that’s all crap. The point of a painting
is not knowing what they were saying
before they saw you, and the point of time
is not knowing. Postmodernist
“intervention” is too small an insight
to base a culture on: everyone feels
at times he’s in a painting, film, or novel;
then time moves on and you’re not.
It’s strange that no one thinks he’s part of a poem.
6
Ultimately the arrow of time
slows and drops
on an infinite plain.
If the beings who are there
to pick it up are merely
organized quantum impulses,
I’m not interested. Let’s say
they’re gods, as human as gods,
as troubled, with a quirky sense of humor.
They have with them the jar
that was originally associated
with the Great Goddess, and when she
was reduced by patriarchy
to a silly girl, became
the box that Epimetheus, the Backward-seer,
gave her. But they have that box.
It’s empty, finally,
definitively, of everything
that was in it, except that famous thing
she shut the lid on, whatever the gesture implied.
Now they take
the arrow, dip it in that poison,
shoot it back.
