In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

82 donald morrill THE SUBDUED PANELIST AT THE TOWN HALL MEETING REALIZES, AFTERWARD, THE TESTIMONY HE SHOULD HAVE GIVEN You’re breathing one of the atoms Alexander exhaled when he ordered the heads of thirty thousand stuffed on pikes to teach his next foe meekness . . . or one from Marie Curie in the lab at midnight . . . or from Stephen Foster dying at thirty-eight, thirty-eight pennies in his pocket . . . Then there’s the breakfast rice sticky enough for tasting texture, the human meal, and the Beijing man inscribing on a raw grain a scene from A Dream of the Red Chamber: The maiden admires her single self in the hand mirror and turns it over to meet the image of her skeleton. That grin is magnified by the helpless glass declaring: be amazed at the detail in so small a world. A donkey brays to the night, staked down by the foreleg. The power lines buzz, just beyond your house? Imagine the legless man on the Turfan-Kashkar bus, rolling smokes for the aged driver out of newsprint . . . and maybe the two Chinese soldiers walking hand in hand near the rail yard, that gesture meaning what? Imagine, too, the knife the boyfriend brought to the rendezvous, that surprised his ex-girlfriend who’d aborted their last link, thinking the way people clinging to the future think: CRSUM09 poetry.indd 82 5/22/2009 12:37:03 PM 83 this is the last time I’ll need to see him. She shouted. It didn’t save her. It didn’t save him from throwing himself afterward into the first oncoming fender. Yes, the sticky rage of the witness, congealing between the mind’s clumsy fingers, the mind dipping into the issue, perhaps to comfort the unknown. You who may have once let a tear trace down your back its thick mineral history—this all adds up to something. Printed on our wallpaper: butterfly after butterfly, identical, recurring. And that courtesan, Myth, ties knots in her sari, that only she can undo. Deep are those wood grains beside the man at your dinner who, coming down hard, once held his pistol to a peasant chin and whispered score me some! The propeller and the lovely limb fit together again and again, the torn city and the cleavage down which the drop of sweat went trying to make you come twenty years ago, and you did come . . . Are you trying still to follow it? So much inside of time we can’t behold—like a golden hound blanketed by hummingbirds. Tonight, as another lie is shouted through the ignorant voting, and the silent back rows go unrecognized, think with me on the confession extracted from broken ribs, on the feelings that have no right. Consider the bougainvillea reddening windows across our region until it bursts like a heart within the heart— and why, why it doesn’t keep us from ourselves. CRSUM09 poetry.indd 83 5/22/2009 12:37:03 PM ...

pdf

Share