The truth of it is, the stars won’t give us any more
answers. We’ve sailed that way as far as we can.
Anyway, the Chinese discovered everything first.
What did it get them? The emperor Zhu Di
forced six million laborers to build the huge junks,
killing half in the process, most of starvation. The palace
burned; he renounced travel. They buried sixteen
screaming concubines alive with him when he died.
Add that to the horrors we already know, there’s a kind of
trance, like watching TV, pixels instead of stars.
On Law and Order, the boy’s father beats the soccer coach
to death because he thwarts his son’s chance
for a scholarship. When we run out of oil, no TV.
Notice when the machines go out in a modern house,
it’s like living in a corpse. Oil is heavier than poems.
Poems think that when the oil is gone, they’ll sing
a ballad of when lights came on with a flick and you
could fly down the road so fast birds couldn’t
remember you. Poems think they’re on Restore America.
They’ll scrape the ugly green paint off the fireplace stone
and bring back the superior life of the past.
Or they will stuff the terrible suffering into some
decorative urn that will ferment it into Beauty.
But the Big Bang is speeding up. All of this good will
is flying apart, and the poem is getting to be
about as sturdy as a spaceship made out of eyelashes.
It acts more and more like people trying to make love
after too much to drink, the climax always ahead
until the blank moment when it’s gone.
Or like the birds outside our window. They think
the glass is the whole sky, some of them, but when
they hit, the other sky takes over, the one they never
thought of. I don’t know why it’s always the house wrens
and the sparrows, the least showy, the ones who live
in the Ninth Ward.1 Poems keep trying. On TV,
I read the bios beside the pictures of those
killed in Iraq, seven or eight a night,
ranging in age from 19 to 45. I feel
the bios longing to be verses of an epic. In possibly
the oldest epic, Gilgamesh sits with his dead
friend Enkidu, whom he loves like a lover. He “veils
his face like a bride, paces around him like an eagle,
like a lioness whose cubs are trapped in a pit.” He tears
his hair out. Why did Enkidu die?
Because of a dream. Because he believed he would die.
This is the poem reminding itself how powerful
it is. Where do the dead sit? They sit
in pitch darkness dressed in feathered garments
like birds. What could be more like living? If Enkidu
could open the lid, living would be the very
pupil of his eye, his own TV screen. Captain Kangaroo
is dead, Mr. Green Jeans is dead, Mr. Rogers is dead.
Veterans with their quiet ways put on their old
uniforms and salute the flag, but the poem is pacing
like an eagle, tearing its hair. “Why don’t you just say
what you mean?” people say, especially the students.
But now the poem’s occupied with the most seemingly
trivial tasks, like asking, “Where do the lost
shopping carts go? Where do the angels toss
their garbage?” And since there will be absolutely no room left
in the Cherry Hill landfill after 2012, the poem
is thinking it will clear its throat then and try singing again.
1. It’s sad how even the most terrible things turn into footnotes. Students will read the footnotes before the poems. They will skip the poems.