Old School (04?)

1.
Purple worms for fishermen, crawling,
exposed, negotiate roads or wrap around rocks,
while in humid unfamiliar landscape bombers rise
beyond your line of sight. You hear broadcasts
about Laotian guerrillas romping in jungle-brush–
why can’t they calm those apes down anyway?
Give them bananas or tranquilizers? If guerillas
could only go back to their cages or the jungle,
not pester innocents who’ve come to see them,
and if visitors could only be kinder to guerrillas,
not haze them like King Kong in his cage!

2.
Laos is how people terrace hills for crops,
or another catalogue of precious minerals
you’re too afraid to touch. Or in geometry,
Laos is a pie bisected. Or in current events
it spells trouble. You learn each country
has chemicals beneath them when you learn
about resources: bananas, copper, or worms
blush in the earth with the ruddiness of iron.
All the world is blut und eisen, said Bismarck,
a cookie with custard within who tried to talk.

3.
Resources from thimble-sized vials
foam on the chemistry set, stain the drop-cloth
of your makeshift crawlspace laboratory.
A label is as much a law as mattress tags.
So if you tear the tag, soon you’ll go to jail.
The warning labels told you not to mix them,
and the tag tells you not to pull itself away
from resting places for heads of the weary-- the labels
on the fruit lack addresses, orange hides kissed
by sun, bananas hacked, hauled by muleback....
the fruits of earth drop in a stony silence.

4.
Laos, Peru, and the resources beneath them...
swirl in the toilet bowl down which you flush them
to illumine nightcrawlers--they grope their way
above the planet in the spring, the playground
become a flood, another water-body to recite
or fish with string and worms impaled on hooks.
Within this migratory sea Laos could be sunk
aswim with butts and landfill. Or like Peru
it’s terraced, or maybe they join in the runoff
to the standing water of the playground.
All terraced places are sisters, all gloves
discarded in life become at some point hands that join.

5.
And the trails overhead that fade when you stare
them down during recess mirror the ski-tracks
furrowing to valleys that stretch to Laos or Peru.
Can guerillas crawl above the globe like worms,
drowned and crimson in the playground pools
when the run-off can do nothing else but rise?
Although your teacher answers your quizzes,
spelling the required words in festive circles of chalk,
still you feel smart: you can demarcate the world
your toes can touch from what they can’t.