Co da In his introduction to The Pisan Cantos, Richard Sieburth explains how, when Ezra Pound was arrested in 1945, in Rapalo, Italy, for making treasonous radio broadcasts during World War II, he was taken to the US Army’s Disciplinary Training Center, which was located in a dusty field north of Pisa: Pound was the only civilian inmate in the camp and, in the temporary absence of its commander, Lieutenant Colonel John L. Steele, overzealous subordinates , no doubt awed by the Washington cable’s warnings about escape or suicide, had decided to confine their dangerous war criminal in one of the camp’s “death cells”—a six-by-six-foot steel cage, open to the elements, which had been specially reinforced the night before Pound’s arrival with sections of heavy “airstrip” steel mesh normally used to lay down temporary runways. Washington had stipulated that the prisoner be accorded no preferential treatment. Orders were therefore given that he be held completely incommunicado : isolated in his cell under the constant observation of a special guard, with the Mediterranean sun beating down on him all day and floodlights trained on him all night, his eyes badly inflamed by all the dust and glare, he was allowed no exercise privileges, no bed, no belt, no shoelaces, and above all, no verbal contact with the world around him—except for daily conversations with the camp’s Roman Catholic chaplain. . . . Pound initially held up fairly well under the circumstances. Witnesses at the DTC later remembered him as reading his Confucius for hours on end, contemplating the surrounding landscape, engaging in shadow boxing, fencing, and imaginary tennis matches in his cage, and ingeniously arranging the tiny pup tent which, out of sheer mercy, had eventually been issued to him to protect him from the wind and sun and rain of the Pisan plain. But after some two and a half weeks of this, the prisoner foundered. (Sieburth 2003, xii–xiii) 240 national healing National Healing Part 1. Cage 1. Six steps east north, west, south a cage or a thought trapped in a fence a soul dragging emptiness circulation without progress a cage a self a river bends crescent blue light as daylight fails I stitch versions of my self from shadows and bits of a monument to forgetting words blow through papers about a square pinning me to shadows sliding across a compound in this floodlight I arrange pieces Coda 241 of this life into one at least intentional fallacy: the writer did matter even as words measure a jagged path to uneven suns blind to the history of falls into bottomless selves mountains turning blue and silver moonlight cage mesh and I dreamt I flew up out of this cage and over this yard over a land all new all free. 2. A life spent trying to be yourself where everyone sees you stupid-faced figuring on feet scraping across a concrete floor 242 national healing like you are expecting someone who never shows it’s like an ending that it’s not it’s like a beginning knowing you weren’t looked for as if this cage were not you it’s like wanting to be new but you aren’t it’s like living two impulses instead of neither it’s like looking for an answer in a square that never existed wishing for relief from a sun or a self rummaging through graceless relics lying in a square released from a dream and flying into a punishing white sky it’s your broken presence Coda 243 in a wrong time and the wrong things they gave you the wrong self you gave yourself it’s blowing across a square toward you crying a night-caged wind it’s like the mechanized jerk of your hand connected to no one unlocking a cage and finding another trick life disappearing clown act and slow dissolve to you saying “it’s going to be another hot one” to no one and nothing other than the one night you heard a voice from another cage as you made figures a geometry of a limited self one parallel line one edge of a square theorum: the difference between you 244 national healing and everyone else the difference you search the twisted creases of a heart mesh fence for some sign that you aren’t hung on a cage drying in the sun a parade ground a sea of faces. Part 2. Circulations 1. A city...