And the Time Is: Poems, 1958-2013

To a Commencement of Scoundrels

19 To a Commencement of Scoundrels My boys, we lied to you. The world by definition stinks of Cain, no matter what your teachers told you. Heroes and the fools of God may rise like accidental green on gray saharas, but the sand stays smotheringly near. Deny me if you can. Already you are turning into personnel, manpower, figures on a list of earners, voters, prayers, soldiers, payers, sums of population tamed with forms: last name, middle name, first name— telephone—date of birth— home address—age—hobbies— experience. Tell them the truth. Your name is Legion. You are aged a million. Tell them that. Say you breathe between appointments: first day, last day. The rest is no one’s business. Boys, the time is prime for prophecy. Books break down their bookends. Paintings burst their frames. The world is more than reason’s peanut. Homer sang it real, Goya painted it, and Shakespeare 20 staged it for the pelting rinds of every groundling of the Globe. Wake up! Tonight the lions hunt in Kenya. They can eat a man. Rockets are spearing through the sky. They can blast a man to nothing. Rumor prowl like rebellions. They can knife a man. No one survives for long, my boys. Flesh is always in season: lusted after, gunned, grenaded, tabulated through machines, incinerated, beaten to applause, anesthetized, autopsied, mourned. The blood of Troy beats on in Goya’s paintings and the truce of Lear. Reason yourselves to that, my buckaroos, before you rage for God, country and siss-boom-bah! You won’t, of course. Your schooling left you trained to serve like cocksure Paul before God’s lightning smashed him from his saddle. So— I wish you what I wish myself: hard questions and the nights to answer them, the grace of disappointment 21 and the right to seem the fool for justice. That’s enough. Cowards might ask for more. Heroes have died for less. ...