From James Schuyler's "Seasons"

Climbed with unholy purpose
holy stairs, by a cypress
the simple blasphemy. Grape-
green moonlight on a wine-
red damask bedspread. The
nightingale song: movement
and stasis, that way of
life is a way of death. A
string shopping bag, cab-
bages, sausages, savour
of day-to-day swelling
Jacopo’s bronze doors at
Bologna: creation and fall.

Unmorticed loosely fitted
stones, straw and candles,
on the Rome road. A cute
church! Refinement of deso-
lation, pink and sulphur
teatime fog on stone, on
a Bailey bridge splintering
beneath jeeps, bikes, carts,
feet. A beggar knelt at an
approach, blew on a grass
blade, “Lili Marlene.”

Michael Burkard - "How I Shaded the Book"

I was in the town before my end.  I knew more deeply
than before I was in trouble with drinking.
I received a copy of a Graham Greene novel, The End of the Affair, in the mail.
I sat down to read it one night, sure I would not like it,
but I could not stop reading.
I felt the romance of the book was validating one more wild prolonged fling,
alcohol at the center of the fling. I had no one in mind but I knew there would be
someone. And I knew it would be trouble.
The novel made me feel as if I could see it all.

In the middle of the night there was a knock on the door.
A neighbor—I had met no one in the few days I had been in town—
asked if I would drive her and her daughter to the hospital.
Her daughter was sick, she had no car. She had seen my light.
For some reason I was glad to do so. I took the book.
The wait was long, the mother finally told me I could leave,
she could call a relative if they had to leave the hospital.

I saw them on the street days later—she hardly spoke—I wondered if it was because
we were of different races. She simply nodded when I asked if her daughter
was all right.
They left their house within a month. The house became a place for itinerants.
Six families in six months. One afternoon I heard screaming and cackling
and looked out the window to see an overweight man who could hardly walk
limping and tilting away from the old woman on the porch.
She both screamed and cackled. The overweight man finally
hobbled off like an old wagon.

I want to thank the woman and her child for interrupting my reverie.
Although I proceeded to wildly continue an affair for drinking
I feel that couple as a pull from life, a pull
from a source I was for a final time denying.
The book meant more than life. How I shaded the book
meant more than anything, anyone.

T.S. Eliot - "The Journey of the Magi"

‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins,
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

"A Blue Line" - Michael Burkard, in remembrance and love

Hey, look, when you used to come into my kitchen
I didn’t even know where to stand, it was my kitchen
but it was yours, that quickly. And the evening had
a metal mouth which was meant to scare us, but we
listened to the desert instead. You taught us.
Unemployed, fuck the moon.

Years later there’s a dog biting into my book.
I pass the book on before too long. I hear feet
running toward the bank, then back again. It’s
night. The wives have come home to look at the
maps. The husbands are thinking invisibly through
someone from earlier in the blue day.

The blue line. The blue hat. The blue Atlantic
and that incredible blue distance to the small
apartment on the other side of the blue continent.
The blue judge, the blue court, the blue cop
good enough to say goodbye instead of staying.

Hey, once in the blue rain I was screaming for
you. It was more foreign than a foreign city.
Every time I left the house the rain got bluer,
and I had to turn back. Worse, I felt trapped.
It went on and on. I went nowhere.

I didn’t even know there was still a blue line
from me to you, that if I had just followed it
I would have found you: lonely like me then,
with your mouth to the window, and the stars
blinking but saying write darkly for now.

Write darkly.

Gaith Abdul-Ahad on the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein

“…So the Americans came to my street, near what is called the National Theatre square, which is just down the road. I started following these American troops, and they all congregated in this square where the statue was standing, but also where all the media were stationed at the time, the big media, and the TV crew. So we were a small group of Iraqis and a much larger group of foreign journalists. The Iraqis were trying to topple the statue, and an hour and a half later, they hadn’t done much beyond smashing some marble tiles. That’s the moment when the Americans decide to reverse one of these huge amphibious vehicles and use the crane on the back to pull down the statue.

And of course, I cringed because anyone who reads history, you realize, this is the moment that should have been the Iraqi moment. It had to be an Iraqi moment if you want to maintain that charade of freedom of the people kind of toppling their own statue. So the Americans pulling the statue was the first cringing moment. The second moment was when the Marine who climbed up and put the big noose around the statue’s head pulled out an American flag and draped it around Saddam’s head.

At that time, I was like, “oh, no, don’t do that.” This is the moment that we’ll be playing again and again on TV cameras. That’s it. This is an American war. Since then, I came to realize that that Marine was more honest than any politician or any pundit ever because he saw the war as a conflict between his army, the United States Army, and Iraq. He didn’t see it as a war of liberation or freedom. It was his right to pull out his own flag as a person who’s been fighting all the way to Baghdad. And I think his act was honest. But of course, that sealed that intention in the eyes of many.”

from https://lithub.com/20-years-after-the-invasion-ghaith-abdul-ahad-on-iraqi-perspectives-on-the-war-and-what-western-media-missed/

David Ferry - "Your Personal God" (trans. from Horace, Epistles 11.2 lines 180-89)

Jewels, marble, ivory, paintings, beautiful Tuscan
Pottery, silver, Gaetulian robes dyed purple—
Many there are who’d love to have all of these things.
There are some who don’t care about them in the least.
Why one twin brother lives for nothing but pleasure,
And loves to fool around even more than Herod
Loves his abundant gardens of date-trees, while
The other twin brother works from morning to night
Improving his farm, ploughing and clearing the lands,
Pruning and planting, working his ass off, only
The genius knows, the personal god who knows
And controls the birth star of every person
There is in the world. Your personal god is the god
Who dies in a sense when your own breath gives out,
And yet lives on, after you die, to be
The personal god of somebody other than you;
Your personal god, whose countenance changes as
He looks at you, smiling sometimes, sometimes not.