from TO HEAR A WAR FROM FAR AWAY
This is the beginning, I am told, if we let it be.
Arrests if you disagree. Deportations. Sacrifice,
I am moved again to think, must come
from how small we have been in the face
of the enormity (the trembling ground, heartache,
the sound a barge makes, fraying over
the black river) we’ve often called God. A lamb,
then: a point of focus, a relief. We’re in need
of a small thing, someone knows. The riot police
with their body armor like wasps and ICE
wielding their orders to make us
Look Over Here. And the here has been
disappeared. These tricks of faith that keep
our eyes on one hand while the other hand
rummages through generations, their orchards
and herbs, pickpocketing them from the earth.
Someone has been sacrificed, disappeared
for spectacle, and the spectacle is small
enough to rage against again. I rage. I fear
this is the middle of the end. I fear the spectacle
has been cut and placed in front of me
the way I cut my daughter’s dinner
for her tiny fork. Her capacity is greater,
she cannot yet be undone by immensity. We walk
down the block. She throws rock after rock
at the moon.
from TO HEAR A WAR FROM FAR AWAY
At the flea market, I touched a keyfob, a belt buckle
and comb, which were all secretly knives. My eyes
felt for a headline’s invisible mechanism. By whom?
flicks open its switchblade. A word makes a thought
come into being. An image, a feeling.
This, I trusted until I saw the point
cutting a hole in the mind for a bomb
to fall through. It’s an illusion
that we live in an age of total recall, total
documentation. Oubliette of infinite
room in the cloud relieves the work
of remembering. Remember reminds
me of a legless child, an armless child.
