A Note from the Meek

 

3 April 2022

Contemplation and power are connected, like freeway spaghetti, fly-overs whose destination you can only guess, though you keep your foot on the pedal; when you get to the other side, you’re still lost, but at least not racing through air like a lost pilot. I have time this morning to look at photographs of the dead in Bucha. Men in drab brown pants, their hands tied behind their backs, lying on hard concrete. Dead women in trenches. (Flashback to previous massacre.) A man in a well, sunken. Death isn’t sleep, because damaged objects don’t rest. They’re scattered as trash in a now liberated city, amid the grinning skulls of apartment buildings. Dwell on that.

Take an inventory of your responses. None of them has currency; they’re as starved as the ruble. Feelings trapped in a container, the air going out of it. Perverse squash court of anger, disgust, nausea. None of it a whit of good to them. Say your mantras, John told me; they work. I’d say now they work at rather than on. I can’t push them hard enough to get them to Kyiv. And pushing is precisely the wrong tack.

Nine people shot in Sacramento, more in Texas. Tomorrow the day MLK was shot dead on the balcony of a motel. Lorraine. I remember the name, and that of his assassin. What’s memory for? It’s this iteration that involves me. I hold to it, try to let it go, fail, then assume the burden of simply watching. Watch it, watch out, watch for. In the sitcom, Zelensky regards a watch Putin wears and turns his back on it.

The wind is up in Ahuimanu. Maeve stalks something on the deck. She sniffed my armpits in the night. No perfume, Walt, sorry. It’s the stink of post-modernity, or post-post, or late late capitalism. It’s my comfort, sitting in this chair like someone in a Stevens poem, reading. We refuse to speak the cause of a poet’s death. We abhor the president’s words against Putin. How do we mediate silence, when we talk our way out of conflict? Conflict makes you smarter, I saw somewhere.

The rose is no more beautiful than the rust on an old container in a field. We can cut a rose, but not a band of rust. We can buy a canvas, but not sheet metal anchored to earth. We can see the rust, the rose, the dead bodies in the street, their geometries turned this way and that, face down, bodies bent as if posed. Neither my anger nor my grief reaches that street, though it may touch my screen. The screen is a way in, but also a walling out. One poet cites another poet on yet another poet and we’re reassured by the echoes. We think of them as wisdom.

Dear Y, who tweets from Ukraine. Your window view turns white with snow. Your voice alludes to massacres. Your tweets have made a community of the meek. We’d better inherit this earth.