From a Terrace
“We have destroyed Falluja
so as to convert it”
overheard in the breeze by the massive
broken oak
Sunday lakeside serenity,
people with their skin burned off, hospitals
bombed by
an us I bleed in
psychically, my government
completely corrupt
To be sixty-nine now, “old style,”
shot through with fecal sorrow,
bedbugs in my mouth, us-bugs, my whole
mouth bugged
The oak leans into blue rapture
over roily, white-capped
gasoline-turquoise water,
its leaves sort of dribble about in the
air
The carnage cloaked by
television’s visibility sterility
—is this less sterile?
Small lichen saucers indented into
hundred year old bark,
noble whorled
wood showing
through, as I would like to
This asunder-written No to
the interventional might of America,
millions raked into invisible piles,
the 9/11 blowback a drop
in the bucket blood of
Guatemala
Nicaragua
Serbia
Iraq
How terrible
to not feel pure
grief for the
WTC dead, how
terrible to have to
contextualize to be honest.
Across Lake Como
mountains rest on the waterfold
in slant shadowed rows, they are
mammoth heads with verdant folded eyes,
beautiful, meaningless
in
an extinction-tinctured view
Man driven by hate for what he is,
a lost puppy bowl
mother-licked, father-interfered
O breathe and just
enjoy the warmth on writing hand,
the church bell tower below,
its innocent stone crossed by
ravens in the shape of men
—I can’t
I twist here
mentally gibbeted,
particle of a warrior form,
hell done in my nationality
the Ho- Ho-
san
ta
cackle-embedded warp in being
Some axial release holds sway
in the after-
ring of a re-
immobilizing bell.
-14 November 2004
Bellagio, Lake Como, Italy