Issue 15, January/February 1998
Karen Wurl - Three Poems

Prologue:
Succeed to this position, enough
rope to hang,
to be well-hung.  Rob from the rich - who else?
Give to the poor and get
a receipt.
All my worldly goods
I thee endow.
Let me show you.  This handful of you.
How tear ducts work.
Who wrote the book
of gravity and fell from grace.


1.  Excluded from history, I was the continent
that lay in your path,
I was in the way
a land
mass.  Your banners won't make me
go away, another occupied country,
domino down,
dissolve.  You should see
the mark-up.
You won't doubt
the blue of my blood
once you taste it.

The conquerors always
come from heaven, angels,
blue-eyed, armed to the teeth.
They think rape's a favor,
I should be flattered.
They are panning for pearls
and mining for whiskey.  They
know where to anchor.
What eminence to ascend,
what to take slave and what
 to slaughter.
Their eyes are sick with beauty,
till sightless,
they barter spun cotton.
The nets in which they sleep
like pearls
are hammocks
are veils
are shrouds
and they, pale beings
divorced from heaven.


2.  What alchemy
turns the milk to pus in your Anglo-Saxon veins?  It must
be love
that makes us lean, till we rise
in the east and set without warning.
It must be love
that leaves us listless
inclining,
declining,
in decline,
this time.

In what river shall we drown tonight?
The stars are very
pretty here.  They are not watching, will not see
you deny me with your arms around me.
They will not witness
the map of your possessions,
or shudder as a splendid policy of isolationism
falls before your advance.


3.  Do you remember everything?
This cholera, sour taste,
buildings we
abandoned?

I am sick with self-
induced stupidity, still dream of being
dumb
enough.

You have ways of making me talk.
If only I had just one way to make you listen.

It wasn't a war, it was limited
engagement.  We agreed it would never
be war.  We agreed we would stop
in time.  But we couldn't agree
when it was time to stop,
just that sometime,
somehow,
someone
ran out of bullets.

I guess it was all about Daddy; it always is
with boys, reptilian changelings beached in mid-
evolution.  Half-formed for water and half-formed
for air, fully equipped for nothing - I don't
hold it against you.  You were a pretty
jelly fish
a manta ray.  Not some tadpole,
domestic
pet, no, I love
the vicious, exotic, your crippled
beauty, your fine
teeth,
the marks they made on me.

Still I dreamed
of better.  I never thought
to march into hell alone; I thought I had your
affection.  Its absence was hell enough.  What shame, what grief
did you endure for me?  What, for my sake,
did you renounce?  Did you exchange
the work of a lifetime, hard-earned respect,
for a cell, or for this
poor room, separate by an ocean's width
from all I knew of life?  Did nothing inside you
shatter?  I am

broken
they say; what do they
know of the word?  Of any word, of Language, my former
God, the one I cast off to serve you.  Yourself a literary
conceit, a device; I couldn't have penned
this tragedy without you, my classical
demise, my fatal flaw, you siren, you suicide, my
hubris made flesh, you gorgeous chalice of hemlock, exquisite toxin.
Each man kills the thing he loves -
unless it kills him first.

You, child, how could I
corrupt you? who were so spoiled already, rotten as fermenting
fruit?  I was drunk
on your petulance; and I wanted to be
that blind, I was tired of seeing.  Did we only
play at love?  If it was a game, the stakes
were high.  I always covered
your debts, defended your honor.  I still do.  Here is my last
installment,
what passes for will and testament.

My dear, I am indicted still
by my own folly; still remember the silk of you
draped upon me, more
than ornamental.  I still remember hands and breath.
And I would crucify myself afresh, die ten more lonely deaths,
all to hear you murmur once again,
my name draw itself from your throat
like it was all the benediction
man could ask for.

I had two cigarettes lit at once, that's how excited I was about being an
American.

I didn't want to go to a school with elevators.  But all the best ones have
them.

It's twelve years since his death.

I found out Thursday.

I put out my cigarettes and went into the building.  I would learn
something here.

I took the elevator.

It was a good thing I always remembered his birthday.  Otherwise I might
not have known it was him and not someone else with the same name dead in
November, 1984.  A matter of public record.

I will mount a letter-writing campaign to find out.  I will say How could
this have happened.  In America.  He smoked cigarettes.  He possessed
illegal weapons.  We rehabilitated him at great expense to the taxpayer.
We rehabilitated him on more than one occasion.  We failed to enlarge him.
A full grown man, still smaller than the cracks
he slipped through.

I need to wake up.

I need to feel better.

I need to know what happened.

I don't need to read this book on Art Appreciation.