Poetic Manifesto C, II rev

WHAT PASSES FOR POETIC MANIFESTO

When I approach the class assignment, to write a poetic manifesto—whether from a direct or oblique angle—I am bathed in waves of exhaustion: this becomes my default Poetics of Witness Manifesto in times of need. It begins at the highest point of the cheekline and extends downward toward the heart and belly and into the songline. I find myself seeking the fetal curl. I understand the classic definition, yet I am helpless to change it, other than to let it flow through me, the words, informis buried within the form. A grave of sorts with only the spade-tip of my pen by which to excavate.

How then, to make sense of MOAB—not a high desert place of fire-colored sandstone and acrid mesquite in Utah, but an acronym the Mother of All Bombs? A friend sends me an email that the Stocton Street Tunnel will function as a rallying point or shelter. I cannot believe, let alone comprehend, what I am reading this morning.

Earlier, I went back to that childhood playground I wrote about in a poem, at Lagunitas School, where we witnessed the bomb testing nearly 50 years ago. Only then, we were practicing for nuclear preparedness for another enemy.  Not against ourselves.

My cousin and I stroll around the school yard...I remember playing in the sandbox with the Daley twins...They were far from identical and why they always come to mind is a mystery. Perhaps it’s because Adrian—dressed in her favorite red cowboy skirt, gun holster & boots threw sand in my eyes, or shoved me down again for no real reason, other than I was there in line—she has become a symbol of aggression. Adair was the gentle one, always bearing witness. Little did we know that we would both become writers. You may know her pen name, a tag left over from a misplaced husband. I think of another Lara—from Dr. Zhivago. The bully who became a cop would be upset to read this but I can’t close the window of memory. Only disguise the names, but what’s the point? To bear witness is the issue at hand.

I walk past the building where the steer jumped through our 2nd grade classroom window. We all piled in, excited to be center-stage, and there was blood everywhere. Thick ropes of it. I’d never seen so much spilled blood on white tiles. Why a steer would jump through a window in the middle of the night is still a mystery. Unless he was chased. Or it was a rumor. Someone must have broke in to steal our treasures—but all that blood. How could he have survived? I thought of the steer’s heart my best friend’s father, Les Stone presented us with, but I couldn’t bring myself to eat it. The rosemary and sage my grandmother stuffed it with did little to disguise it—for I knew that animal by name.

A man is mowing the baseball field. I remember when the bases were loaded, the final inning, Lagunitas against Nicasio: Billy Joe hit a home run, sliding into home plate, the green grass stains on his white knees like crayon scribbles, a benediction of the field for Home Team. And the cheerleaders all going crazy: Linda Gregg and her twin, the one that was murdered.  Through them, murder had come to our peaceful little valley. Or was that the Barbano girl? It was a big story in Time magazine, I later learned. Why I remember Linda and not the other twin too is a mystery. They really were identical: like peas in a pod.  Not like Adrian and Adair. Different mirrors.

I stand in front of my old 5th grade room, and peer back into the past where one spring day, like today, our teacher was telling us about the millennium, and I imagined my life on a day, like today. I daydreamed forward in time to 2001, 2002, then 2003, but then I got stuck I couldn’t imagine myself past the age 50. And here we are. Today.

An odd thought came into my head, of terror, a darkness, of destruction. I chalked it up to childhood angst. I had an unusually susceptible imagination, incapable of erasing or suppressing negative images. And these images frightened me more that any scary movies. Thin boundaries. But as I walked this future shadowland, I knew it was significant, not just nightmarish daydreams. A signifier similar to my grandmother’s experiences of the dead who come knocking, and birds flying into the house. Clairvoyance, my mother said. Déjà vu. Precognition. But I was a firm disbeliever—because she was crazy, everything was suspect.

Only there are some things you see so clearly, you don’t want to remember them, or to bear witness, and the veil of sleep erases, or at least suppresses them. And unless you’re a Hamlet, you have no words for them, until they play out in real time...like reruns of Kennnedy shot over and over. And you are watching shadows flit across the retina. Mirror of time. The only way out is through...

On International Women’s Day, we gather at a friend’s place, once the old Forest Knolls Post Office—an impromptu gathering of women & babies and a few boyfriends from Mexico or Germany. We talk of war, of the upcoming peace march, the women writers arrested at the White House for loitering: I have friends and acquaintances among them: Alice Walker, Susan Griffin, Maxine Hong Kingston, women warriors, all. We are all on Code Pink Alert.

And as I serve the salmon, a shiver runs across the soul like that movement of mice almost seen at the corner of the eye, an acute feeling that I’d been here before, done that. Got the tee-shirt sort of thing. A woman is talking about an upcoming school fund-raiser, the progress of her children in the progressive Open Classroom. How they were so well socialized, they were articulate, but didn’t know how to study. How would they survive high school? And I’d heard this conversation before, been in this room with its white walls, though at the time, it would’ve been an impossibility as it was once the post office, federal property. What good is it to half-remember licking Lincoln stamps and sending away for dreams?

Then there are strange words in the news like behemoth, Massive Ordnance Air Blast, MOAB. Dead man walking on my soul again. Yesterday I fingered the video of “Fat Man, Little Boy, but a shudder ran through me...there are no degrees of separation between me and the bomb: I know Keb; Camp-2; the Manhattan Project first-hand. And now today, our government unveils the mother of all bombs and I can’t help but think: sacrilege. These mothers in this room, I am the only one childless, though my cousin’s child is my godson. All these roots, and I am no closer to writing a manifesto than when I started. Manifesto requires hard, strident words, like Bukowski, Ginsberg, or Whitman. And I have only these small, hidden words afraid of rebirth, afraid of the dark, afraid of the light. The heart glistening with blood.

3/12/03, rev.