Zen Garden?
Eggshell poly-oak
latexed tongue and groove
barwwod and bathstone
plastic inlays
pea-gravel sandbox
plug-in waterfall (no
ribbon snake slips
the burnt fescue)
bracket-mounted
speakers: electronica.
9000 Fascist Cantos For My Friend Ezra Pound
"First
came the seen, then thus the palpable
Elysium,
though it were in the halls of hell,"
Pound,
Canto LXXXI
I can make my fingers into the shape of an eagle shadow on
the wall
but I need the light and I need the wall and the rest is just
subjectivity
which is nothing. A few thousand battered books and we learn
nothing
back at the Tigris and Euphrates, much like we'd never left
it shalom
in the dusty chambers of an old book we've never read shalom
shalom
thirteen stripes and sedition, the camera pours over American
soldiers
the injured and the Iraqi dead and the WTC jumpers splattered
ground
on the sexually assaulted ground and the whole entire world
knowing, seeing
at the very first frame- the poor red girls feet, not planted
in North
Carolina where they belong. Dar yet ere and Lo! don't that
raise thy
tremors?
What's another hundred-thosand Terra Cotta warriors when
you're dis-
connected from the whole world? Is it today or 210 B.C.?
Ch'in Shih-huang-ti, will he be waiting with the men outside
Sian?
And then I want to ask you to forget everything I've said
and begin
to say what you feel in your heart, make it new as one who
eats ambrosia
from Idahoan old-man hands in an Italian suite de facto to
an island
graveyard
I didn't say to the ocean, "I am American" the
first time I saw it, didn't
think of that at the San Francisco public beach. Psylocibin
suicidal LeSabre
parked in the lot and looking through the windshield at the
darkness
American high met the smell I didn't expect. That 24-lane
$1 toll
didn't come with any disclaimer. We bought a twenty piece
of crack
pretended life was something other than this. Pretended we
were more-
less Mauberly than we were, being disconnected from the world
aligned
to a side and protected by seas and by a past we can't understand
because history has never happened to us, is as unfamiliar
as the wolverine
or the pecan. Welcome to America.
