THE DUCK HUNTERS

for Ernesto Livon-Grosman

“I remember beautiful rivers

but not the boat to take you there.”

The shots ring across Plaza de Mayo

16 June 1955. Even

the duck hunters shudder at blood-splattered

column of Cristoforo Colombo,

rising up upon the shoulders of those

from before. While we are now, or nearly

now. “Those who use violence against their

enemies will, turning, use violence

against themselves, even their own people.”

Dulce de leche but the memory

slashes. Go back, daylight too hard to bear,

night soaks in despair. No moment exists

save this one, doubling over heave & mar

& spill, in still more furious repair.

Buenos Aires, 16 June 2005

---

On June 16, 1955, Argentine navy planes bombed the government and cultural center of Buenos Aires in an attempt to kill the elected president, Juan Peron. The pope had excommunicated Peron on the same day. After three hundred unarmed civilians died in the attack, a crowd torched the nearby Buenos Aires cathedral. The epigraph is from a comment by María Elena Qués. The quotation adapts a line from Judith Malina’s 1967 translation of Brecht’s 1948 version of Hölderlin’s 1804 translation of Sophocles’s Antigone.