Three Poems

Uncle Sadness

.....I ALREADY
NT TO TAKE A NAP
....TOWORROW
is what it read on a person's sweatshirt, in Hong Kong,
where messages on shirts are plentiful.

"Uncle Sadness": That's the name of a poem I once wrote
that I can't find though maybe I will but if not
I'll use it for this one.

"meet at the pandas," it says in my notes.

"Dragon Kiln": another title, potentially.

Like a lonely pillcutter, oat-standing,
the figures on the Shiwan roof ridge drove me wild
with happiness, on the next to final day.

The sun is trying to come out.
Not. Beauty farmers, skin rebuild,
the escalator: a shock when I touched the belt.

"We're strong," said the fish.

My ears are hurting,
my ears are hurting so much.
"I'm not afraid
of anything," I used to write.

But now, now
I'm pretty sure
I think.

Do I have any hobbies.
An old lady
that went to Rutgers?
I was like
if you see my timesheet?

Travel-ready, like a tailor at his wedding,
until we're handed off
to the airport team.

Preparing to open,
opening,
my card number
is incomplete.
My expiration date
is incomplete.

"Please Wait": still another title:

Please wait, my lungs
say, my heart, I go,
"My Mac will sleep
soon." Snow over Utah
and later in Idaho.

If you look at my timesheet?
A friend of Jesus, the name of the traitor
has caused me to be
forgotten by many.

Can I write as fast as I can talk?
Like telling Willie Mays
to use two hands.
I think about you.

Where are you going right now?
Where and when were you born?
Where do you want to go
that you have never been.

White teeshirt, silver handgun,
red hoodie.... The victim ran from
the corner west
knocked on a resident's door.

"That's rain that's what you call it,"
you said to us, in Georgetown.

I'm without glasses, they say to me and
breathing into what is new.

Taylor Branch is in my yoga class.

Three things I need to know:
Harry Belafonte's story,
Wave Books,
Taylor Branch is in my yoga class.

Let me bracket a bit and say
with psychological overwhelm,
"Spring Fair."
"The brain blocks out periods of time for us."





I Love You Again

“I love you again”
I thought I heard my son Peter say
to his mother, Cindy
at the airport at Thurgood Marshall,
BWI, while hugging her goodbye one day not too long ago

Six in the morning
I love you again
at the airport
six a.m.
I love you
not such bad words
to hear
even if they are misheard

Unless the love
had stopped
but then fired up again
I love you
again, after not loving you
for awhile
and even then
it’s not so bad
a message
is it?

Or else I love you again, again, again
for the eight hundredth time
again and again
like I did yesterday
when I went back to sleep
like I did today
and will tomorrow
fully, even happy

Witness

There were the spies, three, mixing with the Poet Laureate on Capitol Hill on a night last spring, where one on the sidewalk talked about a poet's audience I think, and the others waited for him in the car.

Our plane I swear taxied past Richard Reid's jumbo jet, the one who tried lighting his shoe on fire but it didn’t catch--apparently it was raining in Paris and he must have walked there, the plane had fifty or sixty cars and trucks in front of it.

My friend, an artist, the Secretary of State's niece, has e-mailed him about a poem I wrote in which I mention him along with Fred Astaire, the Pope, Bernadette Peters, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Michael Jordan, Bertolucci, and others.

The geologist at a party said he'd been working on locations in Afghanistan for the State Department, I said oh, did you see that film of Bin Laden shown on the day we invaded Sunday afternoon where the editing's sloppy and you see that odd, long, pointed rock formation at the very end, as if the camera had swung? He said funny you should say that, I spent the last two weeks looking at that, but he wouldn't tell me if he ever found out where it was.

There's a woman, a friend and colleague of our neighbor, who goes jogging past John Ashcroft often enough the Attorney General and swears at him fiercely the worst obscenities while railing specifically about policy as she jogs by, up close, on his way in or out of buildings.

I was at Bill Clinton's impeachment hearings in the first group one day when his lawyer I forget his name, the thin intense guy, David something, addressed the room, which was, the room I mean, the reason I'd come, to see where everyone sat from the Senate and especially up from that group of representative Republicans, the posse, who Clinton's lawyer actually stood only two or three feet in front of, and when he turned and looked at them he was right in their eyes, not spread out as it looks on television.

Someone I know of late debated Kenneth Starr, independent counsel and later author of the Starr Report, which led to Clinton’s impeachment, debated Starr on cable television for ninety minutes on voting reform laws and won, I hear, and then opposed him in court on the same issue sometime a month or later.

The head of disaster relief for the whole country, of an agency called National Disaster Relief or something, Roy, used to come home in a cab from the Sudan late at night, I'd watch him sitting there in the cabin light paying the driver, looking like he was in this capsule which he was, until back in his living room--I used to say, joke, that we were in good hands, what an envy to be living right across the street from someone in charge of tending to catastrophe.

In Virginia on St. Patrick’s Day a guy, a friend, received a call at home telling him a small church had just been bombed in Southwest Asia—it was in the heat of Afghanistan, my friend the former chief of U.S. security for all of Germany, protection of people, facilities and buildings the whole thing, who's getting ready to retire now. He went off to the living room and I could hear him mentioning the church before he came back and we talked again.

Someone I know this year stood seven, eight feet from Moussaoui you know the twentieth hijacker during a preliminary hearing in which the government argued against letting cameras in the courtroom and she had to make the opening statement--she said she heard from someone that he was praying as she spoke.

I was on a corner downtown just outside the Organization of American States, and my friend Paul said, “Look, there’s Caspar Weinberger,” and I turned and there he was, his face his whole head and upper torso shrinking into the lower left-hand corner of the right rear window of a gold 2003 Cadillac DeVille. His face turned and I think we made eye or at least face contact.

My friend, a triathloner, saw what he thought was a fallen tree (really a mound of dirt) and accidentally ran through the Chandra Levy crime scene. He’d approached and come in at an angle that wasn’t taped off, someone started to scream at him through a megaphone, ran up to him, ranting, and ordered him on the roundabout route back to his house.

Code Orange had come again. I walked into a Starbucks last spring and a man sitting alone in the back stood and stepped toward me, saying something like a greeting but a tentative one. I thought I heard him ask me if he could help me. I forget what I did but order and sit down, thinking the guy was security with his back to the wall sitting at the mouth of the passage to the restrooms. He had a cellphone that he spoke into constantly. Next another man older than him stepped in and they greeted each other warmly though it was clear they were meeting for the first time. They talked about going off in the van somewhere. I guessed there was a tryst developing and this was the first contact point. Then the older guy went to the restroom and the thought crossed my mind that they were both security, I don’t know why. They got their coffees and left, and within one minute literally I noticed there were two men sitting separately each at a table to the left of me, the one closest with a puffy jacket, quiet, solemn, looking straight ahead. The other man called out in Arabic to someone else. For the first real time in town, I spooked, soon walked out, and there at the corner were the two earlier men along with one other—I could see security badges, government badges on them, their town car not parked in a spot just sitting left of the front corner of the Starbuck’s. I was confused, walked to my car, two of the men started walking behind me toward Rite-Aid, and for a second I considered turning and telling them what happened the second they left.

I walked into a French bakery in Langley Heights and the sign said French Bakery. I looked around, a woman approached and asked if she could help. I told her I was looking for some French pastries, fruit tarts or something. She said they’d sold out that morning. I lightly said the pastries in the case looked American mostly and she told me that this was a French bakery, and the owner of the place was French. Right away I went to get take-out at the New Saigon, which looked as it always had, and when I got to the back of the long room, four or five Latina women were there, showed me a menu, and I knew the place had switched to Salvadoran and Mexican, just like that. The New Saigon sign, the photographs, the goldfish pool were still there.

We drove a lot in our routine beside the sniper sites, one of them just a mile or so from our house, then the sight of a white box truck at the crossing to my son’s guitar lesson. And when he got out, he walked double-time in front of me to his teacher’s house. It was easy to think you were always at a distance from the killers, only to learn later, for example, they were working out in the YMCA directly across the highway from my daughter’s school.

Once in sunlight I was sitting in Lafayette Park dressed casually on a bench my legs crossed revising poems, and two governmental looking guys, two crisp suits walked by and as they passed me I could hear one say, “Someone’s not in the office today.”

It’s illegal to play live music in the Metro stations, true story, supposedly because that’s not what the forefathers would have planned, or wanted worked into their city’s spirit system.

Adam says that Black Hawk helicopters circle downtown around the Mall a lot and that they’re huge. There are anti-aircraft guns placed in different spots but I don’t know anyone, except maybe Adam, who’s seen one.

The Secretary of State did read my poem with him in it, while playing poker. My friend showed it to him, he read it, turned to her and smiled, and went back to his game.

Don Gonjae, the NPR correspondent following the president around the world and working in an office in the White House basement, told me he was ten, eleven feet from the spot where Bush pulled up to Putin’s estate outside of Moscow. The surrounding space was green and vast, and when Bush got out, shaking Putin’s hand he said, “Nice of you to mow the lawn for me,” and deep, extended silence followed, Putin and the other Russians stood there confused, not knowing how to start. Gonjae also told me there was a real trap door behind the podium where the president or press secretary receive their questions.

On a plane to Washington from Boston a smart, assertive, sassy group got on, I turned at one point and saw Jeb Bush, governor of Florida, the brother of the president, with the group, in the seat behind me. My two sons told me that while I was in the bathroom Bush told them to be quiet, which I didn’t learn till we were off the plane. When we stood to leave, they opened the rear exit for us. I turned, looked down at Bush still sitting, gave him a deliberate bored and tired look, sure for seconds to hold his eye, unimpressed. As we headed off the plane, seeing we were leaving from the back, Bush said, stretching his arms, “And the last shall be first.”

The former head of the Smithsonian was sitting next to me at a dinner once, I asked him if he’d read Gore Vidal’s Smithsonian. He hadn’t but told me that Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman had been with him on a visit once, and wanted to see the swimming pool I guess in the Smithsonian Castle--it had been a murder site in a Margaret Truman novel.

Even though the District lost population in the 1990’s, experts say it should be able to grow soon.

A man asking for money on the sidewalk outside Arugula insisted on paying for my son’s ride on the hip-high airplane, and while the plane was lifting, dipping, the man called out, he narrated what my son was doing in the plane, advising him on which pedal, which knob, and how to steer.

When the anthrax scare was peaking, 2001, each of my kids picked up a twenty dollar bill on the exact same corner on two consecutive days, then my son started getting stomach pains, my wife called the police, and we hoped they would come before my daughter got home from the dance. But they were still there when she got back, with their rubber gloves, flashlights pointed at the plastic bags they’d put the money in. The next day, all three kids went off to the pediatrician, Saturday morning. Very early that day, I went out to get the paper and noticed a rubber glove on the street out in front of my house, which I lifted with a stick, looking up and down the street to see who might be up and watching, then into the trash it went.

Aside: In 1976, for the Bicentennial, Gerald Ford came to rededicate Lexington Bridge, like Emerson once had, and this time we’d been out there on the field all night, and then my friend John and five or six others were screaming at Ford loudly not far from the podium, and the crowd was chanting less jaggedly behind us. As Ford spoke, his voice wavered and got louder. When he started to cross the bridge, the crowd came toward him, the State Police blocked them, I don’t think Ford went much further forward to put down the wreath. But then people started to cross the river, helicopters overhead, the troopers in black going right in after them, chasing them, pushing them into the mud. Maybe a hundred or more were at this with us, the closest taste of chaos, far from here now.

My wife’s family when she was a girl happened to be in a Burger King in Maryland the same time Ted Kennedy’s family was, on their way to Eunice Shriver’s. My father-in-law approached the senator, who invited the whole family to join them at a table, and right away the Kennedy kids started shooting spitballs at my wife and her brothers.

The tour of the White House was good last time, second time in all, because they didn’t make you stick with the group, or listen to a docent talk and point to things. So if you wanted to stand at a window and look out on the Eclipse, you could, or if you wanted to turn back through two rooms to the Red Room and look at a certain painting again, the freedom was yours, no rushing, walking on your own in all directions, at different speeds, doing all but sitting. The long window views were what I got the biggest kick from.

The shocker photo from the Post last spring was a third of a page semi-close-up of Michael Jordan in his Audi with the top down, turning onto Seventh Street from the MCI garage, just after the Wizards fired him.

At the Olympia Hotel in Seattle I was sitting in the lobby jotting things, a couple of Secret Service standing nearby, when Nancy and Ronald Reagan came down the stairs, months before the first election. I stood close enough in their path to be able to touch them if I wanted, didn’t see them really as anything but smilers at that point.

We’re always seeing the limos, huge ones, heading in and out of town, and if I’m on foot when they pass, I always stare directly at the fully shaded windows, thinking of what the car’s passengers might make of the scene, the street, our faces, dress and carriage just outside.

We never got into or near the inauguration but stood at one of the steel fences one block off, in front of Bush’s car a swath of helmeted men, two snipers on the corner of one rooftop, the motorcade, and Bush's own car totally Darth, with boxy, black-tinted windows, an armored vehicle, which it is, was, and when we got there my daughter was greeted by guys with hugs, who'd just been pepper-sprayed, these guys. My daughter says they weren’t trying to rush the checkpoint but I thought yes, they were, I saw.

Whenever I run into Jim Grady, the author of Six Days of the Condor (the first novel written on the CIA, called Three Days of the Condor in the film starring Faye Dunaway and Robert Redford, set in Washington) he always stresses and stresses how hard it is to publish poetry.