The Lesson

A CGI artist,
master of exploding cities
and imploding people, recognizes what
he’s seeing on television and,
until the power fails, critiques it.
A statesman, who must exist
in a panelled room somewhere, and who
has always counselled calm, puts the last ice
in the last drink. A maid
imitates the housewife in
denial making beds in
The Day After (1983). Only
a prophet, one of a confraternity
of the neglected, feels
a sort of relief. I write, since he can’t:
The spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life.

Dein umschlungen, Millionen

Things go as well as they can.
X million girls marry,
put careers on hold
without regret or put regret on hold,
work more for less at worse.
There are groups, pills, classes, movies,
New York Times bestselling fiction:
from pole to pole that enormous poem.
Some men consider what they’ve learned
to apply next wife around;
forget. Kids exit
via drinks, seek feeling with razors –
inscrutably to other kids
who are all feeling, paralyzed by feeling …
The damned reject (besides masks) the metaphor
at work here, the plural;
there is always only one, who sometimes
dies cursing nurses,
while others every week take others with them.
Whites, whites. The blessed read articles
about groups that have always suffered more,
and discuss how they feel.

I meanwhile, in a room
with a chained megabillionaire,
hurt him cruelly. He may be
the one who recently said wealth and comfort
trickle down from
creative aristocrats; I have been
locked in with his kind forever.
“You don’t help,” I say between tortures,
and he (because art
is evenhanded, masochistic)
gasps, “Neither do you.”

Sumatra

David Antin ( – can a master
of counterfactuals be forgotten?)
posits a situation
where coffee is rare,
elite; and at parties
(if you’re invited to such parties)
you’re served an ounce of Kona,
a drop of Blue Mountain,
and compare. It will happen, but

let’s carry it further. Three measures
of Brahms, a macaroon
you eat with the usual
weed tea, one timed
sniff of the hostess’s
neck, long silences
after each and, from the designated
wit, something to brood about
in your white shirt.

Privilege

We’re going out. The silver cufflinks,
handmade by a friend, are … nice,
all creases sharp, I’m smoking
for the sake of a silver cigarette case.
A text informs me that cufflinks
are no longer required; I ignore it.
In a moment my wife will appear
(she is my wife – it’s important to
hold onto these things, to struggle)
in silks and, as she should be, gold,
and we’ll be off. Another text,
irate and wordy, to the effect
that whatever I think I’m doing only serves
whiteness, the system. I read it
through, find it comforting –
the way cold water would be
even in the Antarctic: one must hydrate.
Outside, a long black limo awaits,
but there seem to be more than one suit beside
its doors, and I think of that character
in Nabokov who convinces himself
that the cops dragging him off are an honor guard.
We’ll be late; but throughout modernity it has
been fashionable to be late:
as if to say we’re busy, have somewhere else
to be, don’t need your damn party –
a lie, of course, but one should remember
what Freud advised aspiring analysts:
that the fake dream can tell you as much as the real.