(Shoes and “socks:” Is the CIA agent
wearing socks or not? How can one
be ironic about socks? Ask somebody
McHemingway, ask somebody subterfuge.)
Ask the desert dwellers, the most eloquent,
least ironic of people, according to Yeats.
The emptiness of the desert makes
lush their language, an oasis of words.
“Bush the Father and Bush the Son,”
“Bushdog,” “Bushpig” the signs in Pakistan
Day-Glo, without irony, bobbing in a mob.
They want George W.’s head on a stick!
But “What is rhetoric but the will trying
to do the work of the imagination?,”
Yeats also says. “Which leads to the work
of the hands,” the Book of Job adds.
George W.’s revenge rhetoric begat bravery
and grand debacle. Let’s emphasize the bravery.
(And, on an apolitical note, I pray Jesus silence
the voices in my head. They goaded
me to slash a savage confusion of something like
quotation marks into my wrists, apotheosis of irony.)