Barter: POEMS

A Brief History of the Century

39 A Brief History of the Century Personally I can’t figure out the scale of things. Several years of misery follow me like a camera: like a slug, I need to attach myself to something. I’m stacking cans in a supermarket, reading Sartre in a corner of the basement, adjacent to picture windows and cardboard-thin developments. The surge of miracles slow down just before they get to our house: of course I hate my mother, trust no one, school’s a parish where the orphan eats his porridge and scribbles frenetically on a pad. An analyst might want to hear about it. Drifting off, he might wonder, Why would we set fire to Southeast Asia? if he didn’t take everything so personally.To this day if I see Kissinger onTV, you don’t want to hear about it. You want to raise the silver bell to see what dish will be inside it, the scent of it steams so close it’s almost strafing, but we’re huddled outside the restaurant reading the menu, everything looks good in advance till they take your job away. It’s nineteen seventy-five and Nixon’s let the maniacs out of the hospital, the explosive battering force of poetry 40 has not yet been debriefed: I mean it’s years before I’m standing on the corner like Whitman and not likeWhitman, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fiftieth Street, where Alfred Knopf used to be, waving a piece of paper in your face, raising expectations so the horses in Central Park are no longer glue—they clop down the path to the pond where women under parasols are rowboats in the sunlight before the century turns on them. ...