This is a poem about grammar, sort of.
But it's in a section called "Witnessing From Afar" which
in this new book also contains the more overtly
political poems of this volume, a few which
I'm going to read now.
"Mysterious Disappearance of May's Past Perfect."
"Even as the beach is blackened again with oil,
reporters tell us if the ship had had a double hull,
the spill may not have occurred.
And now a poet, writing of one who died some years ago, too
young, recounts that had she been and done otherwise
than she was and did, it's thought she may have survived.
The poet does not agree, but this impoverished grammar
nonetheless places in doubt an undeniable death.
Is it collective fear suppresses "might have,"
fear that causes do produce effects?
Does may still trail with it, misused, a comforting openness,
illusion that what has already happened after all
can be revoked, reversed?
Or in these years, when from our mother tongue,
some words were carelessly tossed away,
while others hastily were being invented, chief among them,
overkill, has the other meaning swollen
as never before of might, thrust out of memory,
its minor homonym so apt for the precise nuance of elegy,
for the hint of judgment, reproachful clarities
of tense and sense?"
This particular error is one which
I seem to encounter virtually every day somewhere nowadays,
and it drives me up a wall.