I'm going to read this poem, which is--
it's a poem I never read before.
It's odd.
I was living in Washington, DC a couple of years ago,
other bad news has replaced that--
you remember that when the sniper was haunting Washington
DC, and somebody was shooting people with a high power
long distance rifle.
It made DC a strange place to live of course,
for that period of time.
But there was also something sort of charged about it,
in a way that fear sort of heightens your awareness,
and also there was something almost--
you could say sort of biblical or sort of hallucinogenic
about it.
You knew something was happening as so often in cultural moments
we do, you know something's happening,
but you don't know exactly whence it's coming from,
or what it means.
So, the air was full of speculation about why was this?
Who was this sniper?
Was it a foreign terrorist?
And what did it mean?
But you felt that it definitely meant something.
And so this is an attempt to write a poem
about that, called "Summer."
"God moves mysterious thunderheads
over the towns and office buildings,
cracks them open like raw eggs.
The North has critical humidity, the South
plucks at its sweaty clothes.
The weatherman says, "It's August,"
and a sniper is haunting Washington DC.
He's picking victims at random, from shopping malls and parking
lots, touching them with bullets like blue fingertips.
And some say he's an unemployed geek
with a chip on his shoulder, and some say,
he's an agent of ancient Greek theology.
Gibbs says the sniper is a surrealist travel agent booking
departures only, or he's a dada
lawyer without a client arguing
in 30 caliber sentences.
Robin says the sniper is what the country invented
as a symptom of its mental illness.
And Marcia is sad because she knows
the sniper could have been cured by a regimen of vitamins
and serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
We've fallen into one of our comas of obesity and celebrity.
When the sniper went off like an alarm clock and the preacher
on TV said that he had come according to Revelations 3:14,
to punish us for the crime of not being ready for death.
But as Snoopy, the clerk at the 7-11 said, "What kind of crime
is that?"
Meanwhile, the air conditioners are working overtime,
the rooftops are full of SWAT teams and camera crews,
and the sky too is mobilizing dark clouds
without speaking, menacing at millennial clouds.
We don't know yet what the metaphysical facts are.
We don't know if our sniper is domestic or foreign terror,
what color the chip on his shoulder is,
or what we will do if the sniper chooses us tomorrow.
But when we go out now, we feel our nakedness.
Each step has a slender string attached.
And when we move, we move more quietly,
as we slide among the sinners, and the snipers,
and the summer, in the simmering medicinal ring."