20^th Century Unclosed and Unclothed

 

Not all about the last century, necessarily.

There is the one before that as the furrows of the ploughed field.

There is the magic numen of this hand now, holding pen or

Finding a lover’s ring to toy with.

The bright and the high but I see that we left a few behind in the trenches and

hurry of our millennium.

 

Literati with mouths full of dirt.

Young limbs frozen as exposed board.

Listing doesn’t help,

Never forgetting is barely remembered.

The sullen, sodden defeats…Who cares?

 

The sign of preference for a winner’s brow is more a scar or shadow

As our infamies pursue us.

The closet creaks like an old chest on Halloween, a little too musty

For the thick old sweaters to be worn, a little cliché to say it all again,

Spot of dried blood, cap with now shameful insignia,

Little shames and big tragedies mingle in our moving on,

Our bodies with a crick in the neck,

A hitch in the tank track and mud.

 

We may have better technology now,

But looking in and looking back is still dark, the pages frayed,

The backs broken, the candle’s flame only a flicker

In the migration of concentration.

We are on to other sorrows

As the nesting dolls,

The little blue egg of the robin finally exposed,

The waving banner gone limp or folded away.

 

The Phoenix of these ashes may be the poet’s business

but the wet blanket of sorrow over faces or

Draped as doom on someone’s horizon is worth our attention.

See the collective moving its shattered fence. 

The wall falls.

Nothing is all better.

Nothing is the bottom of the surplus,

The soup tureen chipped blue and white.

 

Such a prize but how can you bring home someone else’s stuff

And not have your cabinet sag over the years

As an old slat warps,

As the knick-knacks migrate with their dusty coats of neglect

Dragging the bottoms like the fire team with their pikes

looking for the dead in the river.

Dragging,

Pulling up wet and muddied garments

With the shells and mud –

Green black with kelp strands and death.

 

I don’t mention death lightly.

Abuser of faces, cancer,

Some familiar found late as the drunk in Spring from the snowbank retrieved.

There are enough of us now on duty to guard and paraphrase what they might have said.

Enough social hygiene in the movement to pass factory laws and to hold a more just trial.

Even enough poets trying out stances like a limbering boxer

To shadow box with the incomplete works and robberies.

Enough from the future to pull us on like a sled,

Enough, enough, enough.

 

Yet we are left in some grim flicker of the twentieth century.

Red hands and swollen faces

Our flags and ideals a tatter of seeing through,

Looking back and shivering

Like an insufficient garment in the cold.

 

The miles of cloth pulling from miles of fields and

The room of a thousand looms spins

Mad and sane as currency and need.

The water captured by an earthen dam.

The young mother in her second pregnancy,

The archive full of Goethe and Shakespeare.

 

Let us read a little further in the tragedy of man,

In the brittle humanity of woman

Combing split ends.

Let us not leave out the people at the river’s edge,

the people of another tongue who

Grasp the limits of the Western cannon and

By their boot straps transform not just the world but the

Reflection of inner vision itself concluding, inclusive

As the soil full yet easily bringing forth another crop,

Mile after mile, line after line

And the sun is never tired,

The moon never sure of our close sorrows.