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It
Is This Ghost Called Fathering, Son
•
(for
Georgette Vallejo)
On
this day, lungs like bellows, lungs like
liberated
and collective factories,
on
this deserted day, both cyclist and labourer
equally
privileged and redundant,
on
this still superstitious day, liberally crow
and
mist,
the
cold empties, still, in its direction.
Such
is a box for this head, black as a mirror.
That
blocklike head bewildered
to
feel this thing like all wreckage
in
some house
to
feel any murderous stone, any at all, stone
or
category,
in
this direction now called day
then
what happened, they ask, whose arms are
unfurled
like commands?
On
this day, windlike, without a solitary
insurrection,
without adding additional genocide,
without
no farther beating, no extra murder, no less
food
that none
in
some house: “holy mother of god!”
On
this overfull day in its dawning, its material
and
theoretical feeling,
head
like light, head black, antithetical as light,
empty,
after work which is no work,
after
dark, with this windlike quiet, this almost
wind,
almost
naked in some house,
where
this labourer and shovel overfill, again
—then
this stone must be called pain,
both
in its feeling and unfeeling roars,
in
this direction now called day.
Simply,
and so it is our human condition
where
we stand on our heads
coming
from yesterday and leaving already
for
tomorrow.
On
that corrupt day, specific in its breaking, its
felling,
practically like a tree,
on
this no more dreamlike day in its broken glass,
on
this shred of day, day surplus no more than any other,
in
some guarded house where nothing happens and
our
rifles are unloaded, where all is unreachable
where
all aches reek of the past,
on
this day politically inaugurated in each moment
with
everything muted and solid, with everything
in
waste like a book, bourgeois and rotten,
colonial
and imperial as a radio,
chemical,
dissected, fabric, artificial,
mouthless!
Then
all pain must be human and desolate
in
its unspoken knowing,
in
our geographical and military direction.
Now
here, senora, is a gull split open
in
the first light already polluted like
an
officeblock.
On
this houselike and imprisoned day, heart
negative towards this stateless Beirut, this ruinlike me
in his past becoming, both and equally cave and inaudible.
Democratically palestinian, peasant, provisional
and MAN, erected daily like a grudge, ropelike, weather beaten
and MAN, (his world corroded with iron and muscle,
to have to eat this shame once, and daily!)
sleeps her bishoplike sleep, glorious and wonderful
and on its head, democrat, communist, terrorist,
and 200 yards away them crops prosper in our withering
like this soviet fuchsia (who me would scream at, silentlike)
in
this grim burrow, in this box of wreckages,
to
have waited so long for this inexplicable direction,
to
be guided in all our erasing like a map
such
is our family:
(this
box, my deprived son, is called a BANK
and
abstract in any slavery like other metaphors and nooses.
Here
is where your hungry nose points,
like
christmas!)
On
our concrete and uprising day, lungs like bellows
in
this strange recognition, with their mouths gagged,
on
this other day, and this struggling day, optimistically
irish,
and workingman and international
(peruvian
in poverty for a song!)
the
walls are thin with his scraping
with
the cawing of inedible gulls and the canning of
resources.
Stare
at it: it cannot enter where there are no more doors,
neither
bank nor stock exchange, nor international monetary fund,
it
cannot own what it already owns,
futile,
furious, dispossessed.
As
if the world was not quite right.
All
pain must be cold and light, personal,
toiling,
expressive, exploited
(both
siege and slum under their canning
and
its epitaphs!)
AND
THE HEAVIER ITS CHAIN THE HARDER IT BREAKS
(toiling
and futile in this sandpit called “work”
rolling
like a bell in our future silences,
singing
in cracks in this choir called “culture”
hands
all fingerless like “philosophy”)
and
this
lightness must be human, and historical and abstract
and
unborn, daily,
here
after all toil and collective in its futures,
here
historical like this house with its dismantling
girders,
its public dust,
its
landlord and spies,
and
this history, like all concepts also a first
cause
(in all our revolving doubt)
and
it is pain and simply
like
a wall being
painted
in stones.
And
so the walls work, son,
and
the floorboards work,
and
the darkness like a name, settles on your head.
It
is these answers that bail the cold to the street
(and
you too will work like a prisoner,
either
running from the axe or into this dark light called war)
much
like my grandfathers’ corpse,
both
sailors and servants,
it
is their answer who calls now like an employer
who
trudges and is heavy and is tomorrow
and
everywhere already today, fearful, in its insight,
this
our most difficult task
in
this glass lie like a statesman.
It
is this fullness of nothing, oppressed,
that
grows like a cancer,
to
be here, like a dancer with no feet,
to
be free already in this burst lung,
to
be so empty burdened with rights,
to
be empty like an applause,
such
combat!
To
be loaded in plastic and textbook,
to
starve, simply, like a wife,
to
be full like a pin,
it
is this godlike priestfilled
fullness
that drowns these prisoners
it
is my father who nails
his
shovel to my head (simply and painlessly
like
an education)
with
his fear of books
who
comes, as good as an other
to
ghost these uprising arms
with
each others desperate
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