From Blind Spot:
The State: from the Sixties File
The earth is flat. I have seen people pushed
too far fall off its edge. Press your ear against
my skull: their trailing voices still echo.
I have photographs. You might recognize
someone you've wondered about.
I remember J--- in my dormroom, the last time
we spoke. His tense posture in the chair.
Expecting my praise would raise its fist with his
for the comrade who understood:
her rape was not a crime
but a thrust for liberation. Something to cheer:
a black man raping a white woman who
walked down the street two blocks from home.
I remember his eyebrows, the fiery tip
of his cigarette, my own mute throat.
Blindfolded, gunbarrel to the temple, boom
slump forward boom slump forward boom
that one VC shot a thousand times on news
brought to us by Saran Wrap and GE
souring forever off-key on my tongue
the patriotic medley sung from the flag-
flying porch of childhood.
Would they zip
our whole generation
into green bags?
2am. Glass breaking above us.
The sheriff and his sharp-toothed dogs
on their way. J--- moves we
end the ROTC takeover, blend into the night's
crowd. As we run, floodlights pour white.
(Dogs! I almost scream, but--
jungles seared of green,
girls seared of skin, Haydee
Santamaria’s brother’s eyes on a tray.
My fears: bourgeois as love. Still, Dogs!)
Always: on the phoneline:
the click: of extra ears.
Every rally, every march: Gene
greets us by name. We joke:
he must be triplets, a camera for brains,
and laugh at mistakes in their files
(always one relationship behind)
like we'd outwitted them
by changing bed partners.
CIA and DD dollars. Even Professor H--- on the take.
The exact dimensions of a tiger cage determined by
which department: Mathematics? Psychology? Business?
In bed D--- and I feed each other pomegranate seeds and
all night,
wrestle over the justice of killing for justice.
Leaflets, cow's blood, draft cards: thrust, thrown, burned.
Two men in sunglasses
can’t find M---'s door; they call D---
posing as friends, for directions; arrest M---
at his hospital job. For smuggling
from the Island-Not-Supposed-To-Be-On-the-Map:
T-shirts and poetry books.
Left in a jail that would frighten God,
his long red curls shaved to bald,
even the psychiatrist who prescribes LSD
can’t bring M--- back.
D---'s security check on J--- turns up: zip.
J---'s security check on D---: ditto.
Has the French government fallen?
Y--- asks. Not yet, J--- reports, but
soon the Tupamaros should seize Montevideo.
A billyclub's quick cuff
to the solar plexus my lungs
airless for what seems
forever. Don't worry, Y--- calls out
as they yank my hair for the paddywagon photo.
By the time your trial comes up
you'll be underground!
The bail bondsman shows the rifle holster
under his suitcoat and smiles,
Everyone has loved ones.
Can a Yippie trust someone who wears Lenin's
glasses?
Or a vanguard cadre take serious
a revolutionary who uses his one call from jail
to order from Pizza Bob's?
O---. The small frame of her body appears
ghostlike in the doorway, holding a cane.
The brown flesh of her knee wrapped
with white bandage. Bullet wound.
Asleep in that Chicago apartment
that night when gunfire
blazed through the door
direct for two sleeping men
wanted dead at 21
dead at 19 (my age then).
When I see O--- next it’s just her photo,
black and white. The headline: Charged
With Genocide! Out Of the Party!
Her abortion
hawked on the streetcorner
as everybody's business.
If you plead to A and B we'll drop
Resisting, the prosecutor says, confusing cases.
Don't have a Resisting, I zing right back
straight out of American Civics
Chapter 7: The American Judicial System.
He shrugs. We can give you one.
You let me know. And he opens the door.
In a book, a photograph: R---'s mother
cooked in a chair. She wrote him goodbye
and sat for death. Her face is his.
Language pared
to what fits on a button
or sounds good with Smash!
The waitress at Pizza Bob's
says how she hates
those buttons staring like angry faces
across the counter leaving such
cheap tips.
Every day in court the same judge
sentences the same young man to jail.
Some days the young man’s white--
most days he’s black. Finally
my turn comes. The lawyer who said
I'd be lucky to get six months
didn't count on Kent State.
Rambling metaphors about lead pipes and marbles,
the judge places in my hands a National Guard rifle,
then shows the whole courtroom
my fingerprint on the trigger.
I walk: probation and a fine.
Why at Kent no warning shots?
The four dead nine wounded
are warning shots.
Any white kid missing
that message is deaf.
My two hands could have strangled him
he was that close in open motorcar, his starched
throat taunting. Kissinger. Haig. All of them waved.
Open palms swinging tock tock
like weights on metronome shafts
The earth should have opened and swallowed
their motorcade whole! On that corner
I was animal: rabid wild dog
barely hearing the voice that whispered
Secret Service Secret Service
It is never as simple as it seems.
