Poem after reading The Long Loneliness
I.
I read your book, Dorothy,
Looking for answers you didn’t have
Nor claimed to have
But when you contemplated the mystery
Of the seeds and your daughter’s crown
You saw Rome and lovely pomp
Decode what was good
And what endured
Through the nights of the race
As we muddled the classifications that bound us,
Denied the chromosomal match,
Saw no miracle in the fact
That a lemur manufactures ascorbate
Whereas you, and you, and you,
And Andaman savages
And the Davos jet set
All have carried a bit of wrecked code
That once meant a necessary amine
And now means only that we need each other
Much more than we need anything.
We, Toba’s orphans,
Who once huddled in the dark,
Our dank fear redolent
Amid the tang of gopherwood.
I think we agree,
Dorothy.
II.
I read your book, Dorothy,
Because you’re a better person
Than I’ll ever be
Or ever want to be, I suppose,
Because I’ve not these thirty-nine years
Ever learned to domesticate
The disgust
That rides through me
When the beggars near.
Because I watched a war unfold
In dull contemplation
And kept a languid opinion
That it might be a bad idea
Buried in notes on my desk.
Maybe I supposed,
Socratically,
Dorothy,
You could teach me something I know,
Weave courage from this
Mess of tissue and lymph
And trim and tack
Until some wind
Impregnated the sails.
III.
In your book, Dorothy,
You found God
In joy
And the pico-unknowns
That underlay your cosmos and apple trees,
And I,
Naïve,
Could tell you that a web search
Is all that separates us now
From the secrets of the yearning seed
And the neurotransmitters
That fire our contentment.
But let’s be frank, Dorothy,
(I will not lie to you
Because I can’t keep track of my lies):
I will confess the arcana of dark matter
And tick down Hilbert’s list of the unsolved.
I will tell you a tale of fractal realities,
Of a frond of futures that they tell me
Come endlessly from the quantum breakers.
I will even grant that whether the Turing box halts
The Nazarene solved halfway to Cana.
And we cannot.
IV.
Still, Dorothy Day,
As history closes its damascene folds
Over your testament,
As the unknown changes its shape with its magnitude intact
(I want to be fair, Sister,
I want the accounting honest)
You refuse to believe
That none of this leads to the stoup.
That the crucifix is only
The first attempt
At something we still strive
To perfect, ever faithful,
In strategic hamlets
And hospitals perched
In the far away myth of Al-Anbar.
(Of course I came for your accusation, too.
I came into the purgatory of these yellowing pages
For embers that might brand
With something life has so far spared.)
Please, Dorothy.
On the beach of Staten Island,
Let’s gather driftwood for the evening fire.
I will tell you how we’ve economized
The Gnadenhuttens of yesteryear
By ensouling drones and whetting the
Anthropocene scythe
And you will respond with Dostoyevsky
And the rosary.
I’ll venture that the pump was primed
With the delta’s firstborn blood
And you will tell me of beatitudes
And John of the Cruz.
I will proffer martyrs of Hiroshima
You, a sobornost,
And we will both agree only
That the water and blood
Have sprung rich from Golgotha
These two millennia.
V.
Dorothy,
Will it seem ironical
Or perhaps pat
That I found a sacrament
In an old mp3
Of you recounting the annals of anarchism,
Of communism prior to the Stalinite kiss,
And as your voice fought through fifty years
Of static—
(So much entropy,
We lift our heads above only once)—
I did think:
Here’s a wonder
(If wonders can teem, as they do in an HTML world,
And still signify).
My phone a brief tabernacle
For your will.
And I stopped and I considered this.
That’ll preach.
VI.
Maybe, Dorothy,
When we are both shades,
When you’ve tired of Tolstoy’s eccentricities,
And Madam Krupskaya is busy educating the lumpen-Cherubim,
When we both drift between the darkling angles
In the lattice of the axioms
That man throws up against the sky
To pin moons on filaments galactic,
You’ll wait with me
Through ten to the power of thirty-four
Intent to see if the proton cracks
And what radicle creeps forth.
You’ll hold me
As the wavefunction falls around us
And our possibilities entwine—
Those worlds where you cowered
And those where my heart bled enough bravery
To stand at your shoulder when the bludgeons fell.
(How thick does my disgrace flood these forking corridors?)
Only don’t save me from the talion, Dorothy.
Let’s tell ghost stories of orgasms,
And holocausts,
Of serotonin and seraphim.
Let’s sort all this ash,
And make sense of it as we can,
With a qibla for you,
With a qibla for me.
VII.
Does it matter, Dorothy?
For there’s only the one lesson,
Surely.
We can do better, and we do not.
And yet, when we’ve been cracked open,
Like ruddy lobster shells,
And our hearts wriggle on the scale,
And Ammit drools,
We will be oh so zealous in our defense:
We did our best!, we shall say.
They held the bullhorns,
They wrote history,
And we believed them.
And they said:
Help them not!
For they are perverts and they are already damned!
They are greedy. They are lazy.
They are against the revolution.
They are for the revolution.
They spy, they spawn, they steal, they stink.
They are disloyal and they are armed
(And they are having this very conversation).
We were so very scared, you see.
Miserere nobis.
Nescivimus nos.
We didn’t know better.
Does it matter, Dorothy?
Just who gives the verdict?
Which gouty judge clambers up the dais,
And clears his throat,
Saying,
Goddamn you fucking apes.
How many mujaddids and mahatmas,
How many avatars and Avalokitesvaras
And siddhas and scientists and saints
Do I have to wind up and set forth
To get you to stop torturing each other?
I have given you brains that can count infinities,
Minds that can unfix time.
I have watched you poke stars,
Levitate steel,
Map bereshith
In the shifting sands of the shifting void,
And you claim ignorance
And plead for forgiveness.
You love me? What need I of love?
I am clad with scales thick beyond all measuring,
My carapace infinite, my blood neutronium.
My tears so heavy
They debase elliptical purities.
I pick quasars from my hair.
How shall you injure me?
And then, what can I forgive?
And what can I send?
To clear the clear,
To make the obvious more so?
Another novel? Another opera?
One more documentary?
A new, subtle exegesis of Samaritans
And figs?
Or shall I waterboard you in the gutter?
Incarnate you as tapeworms?
Flense the delusion,
De-rationalize,
Commune with you once again
The shriveled horror:
To be poor
To be powerless
To be persecuted
To be condemned to picking
The cluster bombs from the cyclopean teeth
Lining the Plain of Jars.
You have made me state it so often
That it turns to moist cliché in my mouth.
But once more, for the stenographer:
Love each other.
Be kind to each other.
Before the wind dies.
Most nights, I cannot sleep for the ticking of the argon clock.
It has been one point eight million years
Since you told your first story,
And curled your toes in the Olduvai muck.
Time enough to know better.
VIII.
Don’t misunderstand me, Dorothy.
I damn and am damned.
I will wait in harrowing hell
Until the Hawking radiation
Releases every last soul.
After we forget why we suffer.
After we forget how.
Only then will I tunnel free,
More eschar than man,
And watch the nebulae
As they resolutely refuse to coalesce.
IX.
In the closing static,
The universe, physicists augur:
A garden of singularities,
Black holes murmuring secrets.
We know now—did you?—of the mausolea
That anchor galaxies,
But even they conclude their testimonies
And leave the manifold virgin as once.
And Dorothy,
I have to say,
I still think those seeds managed it alone.
On the shores of Tottenville,
Mastodons still wallow.
Lenape yet abound.
We come again to gather driftwood,
For the Sabbath Atash.
I don’t know if there’s time or humanity enough,
For these seeds to dehisce
And speak a coy green wonder in twilight.
But better we than I,
To pray in this starless hall.
Hold my hand, Dorothy,
For I am amazed.
Pad-footed comes the night.
Posts
