New Leaves (04)

1.

It’s too late not to start a brand new page
on which new lines have been cancelled.
A pen-stroke settles fates of the displaced.
Guns to butter cannot bring them back.

2.

Sheaves of bank-notes heaped
in safe-deposit vaults move mountains,
get the desert, mosquito-style, side-drilled.
A Bedouin child tosses stones for a border
Gertrude Bell chases on her dromedary.
Sand buries a perforated line of stones.
On maps, this cancellation fails to apply.

3.

As I cancel bad lines, making them
no longer history, I exercise a power
over life and death. Think of pages
miles long and wide, trekked
by dromedaries, surveyed by vultures.
What if my poem were a treaty?
Would it be a broken pie-crust (Lenin)?
Its revision changes nothing,
the capitals bumpy as braille
despite a trench of lines across them.

4.

A mosquito-bite can be a message,
like Marconi’s transatlantic S
beamed from the dunes of Wellfleet.
Sand nearly buried his contraption.
Fire is a message without a verb.
Marconi bettered the performance
when he transmitted a sentence:
greetings, from Teddy to Edward.

5. Marconi Centenary

Sand sways one place to the next--
erosion isn’t absence, it’s displacement.
Which is why the message can’t be sent
from the same sand-mound in Wellfleet.
To paraphrase likewise displaces
and retells what the event was like.
A century was far too long to wait for it.

6. Vicksburg Battlefield, Arabian Peninsula, etc.

Memorials are holes in the ground–
the ironclad shell, the Mississippi
as she shifts west of Vicksburg
(her trenches marked by guidon flags),
or burning wells among sands and tribes
with two-piece suits, kafiyas, cell-phones.

Every cell is replaced in our bodies
until none of the originals are left
until we paraphrase ourselves
and greet ourselves with valedictions--
ciao, our presence cancelled. The ironclad,
its boilers intact, is the semblance
of its fearful self: its crew
were prisoners who fled to tell.