The Authority, and: Line of Reason, and: Other Acts of Terror, and: Place Your Bets

THE AUTHORITY

Call it what it was—a Watts, or the brick’sbright salvo against Reginald Denny’s face.How triumphantly bloody now I remember it:the red truck, the driver’s side door aimlessas a slipped toupee, or the flap of one’s skull.Or how homes, playboy, after he dropped him,seemed to high-step, seemed to glad-hand the air.

We were talking about West Baltimoreafter dinner, about the boy who, at the behestof his mother for breaking some windshield,turned himself in. My son, our son, becausewe have gone hoarse for years trying to get himto listen, thinks—here’s a story about obedienceand redemption. And given the divine narcissism

of childhood, where the juice-stained protagonistoften emerges from an orchard only to confess,or the soldier returning, whose wounds vanishafter his feet are washed with palm oil, or sweetsweet Isaac, the bound body, and Abraham’s stayedhand, who wouldn’t believe that God rewards.

LINE OF REASON

If the best defense is more offense,as with the boxer, who in his infinite wisdom,hammers the already awestruck, castingdown upon him, the long broken shell,so many garlands of blood, and ratherthan look away, we quarrel with ourselvessaying, he shouldn’t have tried to get up,that that’s the trouble with people, theynever listen, never accepting what it meansto stay down.     And if, let’s say, the boyin question, had actually committedsome “strong armed” offense, as in:I myself always wanted me a wholebox of c’gars or that that moneyin your fucking pocket was always mine.But then the Hill uses the word, vermin.And the Hill sings without sleeping.And the wind burns the grasses bare.And the Hill says: you don’t want to findyourself on the outside of Freedom, Boy.And boy, here’s the blunt end of all

    my grace and goodwill.

OTHER ACTS OF TERROR

Because there is always a marketfor vegetables, or someone caressingher lover’s hand, or the dead silence,a horrible silence before the tremor,a bus passing rattling the glass plane,the saucer bouncing twice beforeit falls, the birdless sky, a cloudlesssky, made less blue now for the lackof it. Once a woman with flint-dark eyesshot a look straight through me,& she held my hand for a very longtime. I’m not that old, & I toldmyself much later that she was justfucking crazy, that she wouldhave burned herself up, & burnedme up, & cracked thunder againsteverything I’ve owned. I didn’t knowher, I don’t know her, but she goes onsinging at the doorjamb, dancing her hem,she’s point & periphery, all flash & hum.

PLACE YOUR BETS

And out of hunger, where you so neatlyhave honed a poetics of debt and redemption,and your own special scent of a womanbrand of transformation, I understand.And how fast, or far, or in which directionour particular genealogy was meant to travel.So what, or where, or whom are you after?To inherit the bright and bitter geometryof our aesthetics, it’s our obtuse hairdo,or an extra “u” in the already unusualspelling of an Arabic name. It’s what eddiesthere on the metaphysics of our ring shouts,or how we learned to shit talk and dance.And if I could gather enough distance,or another opiate, I, too, might marvel,might second-guess how I’ve hammeredthe hitch in my giddy-up into some broken cool.