Aunt History loves Rosa Luxembrg
The Sparticist one
Who believed it was possible…
Don’t be foolish
Auntie says
Stop praying
“Women’s freedom
Is the sign of social freedom.”
Stop praying, get off your knees
Meantime unshakable dark
And thought inside a thought
Which is sometimes sung
Aunt history is cooking up a storm
She starts with the Renaissance—
Silver coated oysters
In questionable aspic
In later centuries
She uses spam
It’s not about eating well
It’s about chewing
History is a bolus
It’s the cow’s cud
It’s the thing
Your dog finds
The Baltic winter
Is coming
Keep those jaws going
Don’t flinch
Open wide
“I can’t unsee the past, can’t—
Bleriot flies over
Can’t unsee the silly airplane!”
In this way Uncle history
Is an old old man
With the soul
Of a Luddite
Machines get worse
Guns get bigger
He sorts his socks
Talks to himself…
“Bub! Can I call you
Bub? Ned Ludd?
Lets hide in the forest!
Oh please don’t say
Its too late!”
Boolean Logic
A friend lost his eyes once–
He was washing them
Prosthetic eyeballs
and they dropped
rolling
two plastic eyes
in transverse directions
My friend
froze–
no words
eyes
like an infinite
sequence
of mistakes
But he heard them
oblong, blue,
exact as algebra
The Titanic keeps sinking and sinking
And Uncle history thinks he knows why
But he’ll never tell
Its enough
That the story
Is never done
It keeps him youthful
Though he remembers
The world’s first shipwreck
The papyrus was soggy
But he’s young at heart
There was a Victrola
On the doomed ship
But only one record:
Tarantella Sincera
A comic song
To be sure
The trouble with “being” history
Is that your blood is everywhere—
In fact there’s too little for the heart
In turn this affects premonitory moods
Stepping around puddles
Uncle history has to look down
Before he can look up
The unknowable is known
“This is terrible” he thinks
“Where’s the Aeolian harp?”
But the wheel of history
With solidifying blood
Turns with
And without him
With its tumbrel squeaks
Uncle history wishes he could fiddle like Nero
But he’s tone deaf and clumsy
Still he loves Shostakovich
And the music of distress
He loves the composer’s humor:
‘Love us when we are dirty
Not when we are clean…”
The planet is filthy
Across the globe
Children are in rags
Landlords laugh
Til they wet their pants
Uncle’s hermitage
Is his left eye
Though it scarcely works
How like scattered petals
The ashes falling
Looking up, Uncle history
Sees the past—clouds
Represent Pol Pot
Treetops whisper
Of the slave trade
He has a neck ache
And his hands twitch
Holidays are hard
Labor Day? Don’t
Get him started
“Look! Up in the sky!
It’s Henry Ford
With a Tommy gun!”
There’s a cloud straight above
With a keyhole
At its center
As Jung put it:
Where is a height
Without depth?
You must let children grow up
But you must also let them grow down
Poets know—Wordsworth knew
The ballast of childhood
Stays in the boat forever
Some nights I wake
From deep down
To the sound of water
I’m at a conference feeling lonely
Outside a brutalist building
In the falling snow
I have a perfectly reasonable
Conversation with a pigeon…
Its dusk and smokers arrive
Laughing about a colleague
Its a fact that pigeons are the only birds
Who can recognize themselves
When the day is insufficient
In the darkness of broken manners
I love my pigeon for this
Planet of the Blind 