The new house adjoining the park –
with shingles, gables, verandahs, trim
a rich cream, a feast
of postmodernist set-pieces – flickers.
Two gray weeks, unseasonably,
if the term now means anything, cold
or warm, must have heralded
this strangeness, while leaves downslope
held pointlessly on, then fell at once in no wind.
At issue is whether that house would exist
in a just society. The garage, no question,
could house a dozen otherwise massacred
people, provide powder-room access
while they chopped the park,
built fires in the driveway,
cooked chipmunks and strays. One would like
the construction of the house
to be less flashy-cheap – damp sheetrock,
warped boards – but if even the rich
are sold such things, how shall justice be made
of stone? The current residents
communicate with an uncertain cosmos
through lawyers who say their kids are decent,
one’s in law school, and the family
has paid enough, enough,
for the right to be left alone.
So it flickers, the house, sometimes there, sometimes not,
like the car in the driveway, like wealth
or gas. When it isn’t, man isn’t,
man never was; but the hunted
and hunters among the thick trees lack
a voice to express their joy. Or perhaps
it’s my mind that fades in and out,
like some words, like the idea
of justice? I knew an old man once
who still nagged at the Purges, the Icepick,
the Spanish Republic. Lately I
myself remembered the slogan,
“Don’t forget to smash the state!” –
its meaning a dried, buried cyst.
And during the campaign, our friend Lily,
pushing eighty, volunteered.
Obama’s people sent her to Colorado.
For six weeks she made phone calls.
Burnt out one night, she heard herself pleading,
“Imagine the windmills and clean cars.
Imagine the citizens’ groups.
Imagine the earth being healed and revitalized.
Imagine being very proud.”
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