Part of what I do for a living out in Provincetown
is I'm a massage therapist.
It's a wonderful profession for a poet.
It's very quiet, very direct--
make people happy.
This is a long poem called "The Massacre."
And part 2 makes reference to that.
It also makes reference to the friends
of the dead-- we, out in Provincetown, have
lost a great number of our friends to AIDS.
The poem begins with a reference to Xerxes,
who was a Persian King way, way back in--
I don't know, fifth century, maybe before that.
And the Persians were always invading Greece.
They were always after us.
And he had come up to the Bosphorus, where
Constantinople, Istanbul, is now, and was
trying to cross the water to come down and invade Greece.
He had one more time.
And the waters were not friendly.
He was not able to sail.
And they waited.
And his army waited.
And they waited.
And finally, they were getting very restless.
And he ordered his men to whip the ocean.
This was taught to us in grade school
as an exercise in futility.
But--
[LAUGHTER]
--there are other ways to look at it.
"The Massacre"-- "I understand Xerxes's command
to wield the whips on the intractable bereaving
apron of the sea.
I beat the foam with racket and with bat,
hoping the tangled plant in my therapist's office
will escape the havoc of my grief
and when it thrives, from week to week,
increase the fervor of my sickle arms sowing
the calm air in her witness.
A murderous growl, like a machete,
flattens the delicate bronchi where the lungs come to a stem.
The ghosts are with us, poured from bruised tissue
like the blood I spray, embarrassed, on cream sheets.
My scream is tireless, my arm its pump.
I hate the arrogant poet who last night remarked
how much the natives recollect their wars
behind the birthplace of the ancient memory he came to paste
onto his suitcase between Rome and Istanbul, Berlin, New York,
a gaggle of invaders around the nameless, dusty, unmarked shore
young Homer roamed.
Suitcase rhymes with exile only for a native.
I had to learn it rhymes with the Bahamas
for the touring clerks, who keep the books that feed
on distant ill-remembered war.
Two Germans walking home one dusk
cracked a boy's arm across their thigh bone like a faggot
and threw him on the pavement, writhing.
It was full.
The fabled light of Athens shown on the protruding bone.
Their boots were new.
They raised the infected dust.
And in the silence of the boy's disbelief and pride,
the untold eons hide.
2-- the friends of the dead lie in my table.
I do what I can with their breath in my hands.
Witless, the birds are singing.
The crocus garland month lengthens our light.
I want it always to be light.
I fight the night and win.
I peel my eye against the black and white TV
until it dawns, then sleep.
The Palestinian and Boston homeless split the screen.
Number of children living on Brazilian streets--
what is 40 million?
Jeopardy's prey fill the camera, their stripped
and stunning faces emblazoned in the halogen,
a kind of sustained lightning.
And the peasant heart, who counts
the seconds between flash and fall of thunder,
shrinks from the looming toll.
Horror is toxic.
The lesions on our organs keep the score, the gentle
and the hard are being taken in legions.
And the globe might shake us off its flank like quarry dust
and start again with something less free, less wrecked
by greed.
But it suffers us on its blue cetacean patients,
like festered barnacles.
Like counted sheep midair over a stream, the friends of the dead
pause on my table.
A shofar is ringing like starlight,
too young to have reached us.
I do what I can with their breath and my hands."