I
“Power, like a ball of fire,”
Wrote Solzhenitsyn
Of the Revolution,
“Bounced from hand to hand
Till it found a hand
Hard enough to hold it.”
The professor of sedition frowns.
Is he endorsing Lenin?
Could the quote be read—
“Back in the USSR…”
When he opens the door to the past
(A false electric panel
Behind the wine rack),
The crystal face—the luminar
Of Venator—displays
A white unicorn parade
In knotted golden braid,
Minutes before being
Maimed by hand grenades.
II
Power is the lost language
Of the heart, the heroine
Of its heroin. At the heart of love,
Power over those we love.
In marriage this bond is mirror,
Apes on each other’s leashes.
Such leashcraft lost,
The marriage is sterile:
The cold click of pool
With only the 8-ball—
In and out of the pocket.
My love, we are not perfect
Spheres but panting apes,
Hot and hairy for the air.
Every marriage is a treaty;
Every treaty is a canvas,
Brushed by time and luck,
Brushed by art, brushed
By fear and love, brushed
By power’s rightful arm.
III
I cannot picture myself remembering
My life without you, without you.
I mean that as literally as I can say.
In a well-formed double memory
Every stroke is stroked in duplicate,
Opposite colored fringes
Of each disconverged pixel,
The chromatograph ghost
Of mixed ink. I would have choked
On your tube. Even now I would take it
In my lungs—the horrible, hard plastic.
The taste. Softened by infinite lemon
Gel—“each drug that numbs, alerts
Another nerve to pain”—even sleep
Precedes the devil’s victory. The pump,
The temporary ventricular pump,
Cost eighty thousand dollars. It tried.
It let you say bye—with your hand
Too weak to write and your throat
Full of plastic, your eye was awake—
And the nurses, full of nursy wisdom,
Executing the Schmittian exception
Due all death’s dry colleagues, had
Damned the cough, and admitted the kids.
And this is the last minute I remember—
Later is the novel of someone else,
A passing story I hardly know.
The nightmare medevac,
The warm corpse in the city—
Then some other things happened.
I cannot remember it without you—
Nor is this any metaphor of speech.
IV
O chafing children in a new
Regime, what have my Gertrudes
Cost you? Or am I Gertrude?
The summer catches us
Unawares like a wave,
Each in our own deep.
She was always the stone,
I only the sand. What
Have I given you but sand?
Sand, like grain of stars…
Your mother gave the gift
Her father gave her: the gift
Of death the kiln, death
That maketh clay to tile,
Death that dazzles the world.
We love in others only
What we are unable to make.
V
I am your Roman father.
I could have you killed—
I and your mother at least.
Pending genetic results
We might. It should be fine.
Note also that my vineyard
Was joint with my first wife,
Whose blood you do not share,
Whose half you cannot hold,
Which falls to hers alone.
Again, it should be fine—
Even if we divorce, which
The Romans did too. May
You dip your toes, which
I actually saw on the monitor,
In the purple next century.
May we mold you merely
Into whatever your maker—
Not your mother and I,
Jupiter Optimus Maximus,
Who makes the sun move
And the plants grow, and
Tailors every chromosome—
Already defined you to be.
While we will seem to come
When you call, be not you
Deceived. It is Jupiter we serve.
VI
There is no door to the future,
Only time and space;
And mine is getting smaller.
As man’s body rots
In middle age, his horizon
Diminishes to a point.
He needs to be going faster.
To live is to crash into death
As late as possible, at the highest
Possible speed. This dial
Is half of the art of the arc.
Why then am I idle and weak?
Why haven’t I finished my book?
Born to wreck the possible,
The professor of sedition laughs.
Disorder has cut creeks
On his face—not to speak
Of his gut… “He who refuses
Does not repent,” though the balk
Be point of public record—
“Faster, faster, till the thrill
Of speed overcomes the fear
Of death.” Juenger in his fifties
Dropping acid with Hofmann—
Never mind Foucault.
Everything now becomes fast;
Time is exquisitely sharp;
Doctors as dull as the Pope.
Print me new organs!
Print me a new wife—
Measured in pages per minute.
“This is the unstable world and
We in it unstable and our houses.”
Nevada is on fire again,
California uneasy
On patient hidden rifts,
Austin uninhabitable
In roachy summer musk;
On the sidewalk a kid
A third my age almost
Nails me with a scooter,
While some maniac gibbers:
“What are you looking at?”
As a professional matter,
The professor of sedition
Must be traitor not only
To others but to himself.
He must be blinded by speed,
Never blinded by memory;
And this keeps getting harder
And only more important.
In Europe there is war again—
Content is staying thirsty—
On the stair a cockroach
Finds no shelter from his boot.
Will his words ripen as he rots?
The hard drive is full,
All sectors at capacity,
All active processes
Locked by blocked writes
On a frozen semaphore.
Moths and flying ants,
Sex drones and imagos
With weekly funerals,
Find power in the blue
Glow of the pool light;
The game is the urgency
Of the insect, the patience
Of the turtle and the mind of the snake,
The dove’s cool and the pace
Of the stalky African dog.
The rhino’s fear is optional
But not his vast stubbornness,
His impenetrable hide.
The hotel pool is green
Enough to host tadpoles.
The summer has its own gale;
No one can tack against it—
But set anchor, or run,
Unruly as the last leaf.
(July 2022)