1

Nineteen Eighty-Nine

How history could lead to human happiness

The theme. The tragic view will never lack for champions

So bye. Not here. Time to leave the fact of tragedy

Behind and tell what happened, better, dance what happened:

Twenty years ago my daughter danced; she knew

What was happening, knew it was good, I don't know how

But she knew, and danced: the wall’s collapse, the evil

People’s disarray, scent of the new, of course

Pilar, she knew, and did not need (we did) to question.

We were as we were, of faith not much, and good reason,

Because as children we saw shut the grim world’s lid.

Domino rows of nuns set up and collapsed each day

Making us pray. What you don't know is your fault, they told us.

Everything rests on you.

Because we could not know,

We took up the world, Russia in chains enchaining; 1959

Zoo of saints, holy card fever of apparitions,

We toed hairtrigger tightropes above the destroying abyss, the

War that would come

unless we prayed. We took up the weight of a

Planet weightless in fire, in vacuum. We took up the world

Because

what had stopped listening to this world

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might listen to us

Soft-mouthed children letting go our prayers to heaven. We

Took up the work as we were told, took up prayer,

Took up the weight of the work of prayer to rescue a world

Hanging from our lips.

At night I dreamed the clack of rosaries.

I am, so I ask:

Was this the year the prayers were answered?

Choir of the world, nights of past and present, we prayed, and

Down past

Hungarian priest teachers who had hidden in hayricks

(Lips greying at borders as Nazi voices neared)

And leapt into the winter night to choke and run--

We read their tree-trunk wrists; no doubt about it, they'd

killed,

Gladly--who, when we answered roll without knowing our lessons,

Knocked us down and screamed, How you not have study?,

At us, these freedom boys jacking off the years--

Their stories on one another, how one's hair had gone white

The night Russian tanks trampled into Budapest, how another

Wrenched out a Red grunt's arm for a garbage-pancake,

How the Blessed Virgin cradled me in my cell as I awaited

The firing squad--all of them woke up screaming nights, all

Prayed like stonebreakers, harder than we'd ever seen anyone

pray,

Now bargaining, now demanding, now threatening heaven so clearly

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there,

Combusting self utterly, dying into the words,

Praying sinful prayers of hatred, viscera, history;

Down past

corridors dunning with alarms and Duck and Cover,

Throats junked with confusion as we practiced hunching underneath

Our desks and toyed with gum and read carved initials

Joking, listening hard for the Russian hum of bombers;

Down past stick figures in Civil Defense cartoons

Instructing us what to do in the event, as radioactive

Silt slipped through doors, windows, sickening stick people

Not lucky enough to locate an underground shelter

While luckier sticks sat safe behind concrete, playing cards in

Fearsome 2-D lamplight, awaiting the all-clear,

As if, in the lie of patriotic TV, there could be an all-clear

Once houses burst, pencil-trees smoldered, and time was

poisoned;

Down past 1962

air raid sirens whining on afternoons already

Furnaces in rehearsal for California summer--in sober twos

We marched across griddle blacktops, schoolyard wriggling,

miraging,

Into the church vestibule, we blinking at sudden, cool

dark,

Groping down a trapdoor stairway, throat to a dead, concrete

Gut, fluorescent air, bunks, shelves and shelves

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Stacked with the largest cans of peas we had ever seen--

When all whispered games of boys played across questioning

Eyes in underground shelter, perfect atomic oven,

God won't let it happen whispered to still daymares of

Invisible wind-borne benediction of death's-head fallout,

Flash deaf instant of airless annihilation,

Until, like fear delayed, the sun-hot hurricane wall

Melted eyes, cities, forests, borders, futures--

Silence in a cool bunker; panic beneath a church;

Down to

an autumn night, a house swaddled in suburbs, 1989

When we walked the rooms saying, How about that? Can we

Believe it?, and nightly news ran tape of what looked like a

party--

Legs in Western jeans, lives dancing on a Wall,

Hammering holes in the Wall, spraypainting handwriting on the

Wall

In tongues known and unknown, chanting rock and roll,

Posing, stars for tonight in the global media spotlight,

Strolling two by two past Checkpoint Charlie guards

To shop--stake in the heart of a past of lowered standards--

Taking souvenirs, and our four-year-old daughter lisped, dancing,

Daddy, they took down that evil wall you told me about

And the bad people aren’t winning anymore, when even

She knew and was glad,

I realized I never stopped praying.

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The Year

In the streets outside,

the good life numbs

the praying nerve;

Pain rends like a ripsaw along the grain of the world.

On the right, I steady the nail; on the left,

I avert my eyes; I, middleman, bring down the hammer.

Suburban air reeks with the shame of omission: the greatest

flight

From history in history. Unearthly energy of denial girds

Silence at any cost. Money waters a cataract garden.

This year, of all my years, let me write down.

Nineteen eighty-nine was born with NATO and Warsaw Pact 1/1

Tanks nose to nose across Eastern Europe. For many years

The forecast was grey. Suicide massed like a cold front,

A winter habit, Saint Tedium, body never

Let rot. Monuments arose of mendacity and terror. A new man,

We’d heard the name, a Gorbachev, port wine stain

Reminding us his televised political head was flesh,

Remained standing when Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko fell

Lightly as Assyrian towers. Those days still a question

mark.

Gorbachev, that oddity, speaking of open Communism,

Taking it not all the way, building his own undoing.

Prague 1/2
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in a desolate January:

crowds of thousands bulked

Dark coats against the dark. They remembered a human

Candle: Jan Palach, who, twenty-one years before, had

Ignited his body to an outcry against tanks.

Forbidden singing.

Rumors: decay in the regime. Again the old shout,

Nineteen sixty-eight's song of spring, and

See: routine claws of the bear mauling the crowd, 1/15

Bullets into coats, routine blood, routine death.

With such a beginning, you wouldn't have thought this a savior

year.

Those who died died. Call them heroes. Yet there was

Something old and tired about it.

I remember where I was, 1/19

Barber's bourgeois chatter as Gorbachev's sound-bitten face

Swirled, image pale on television. Flesh went proud

When Gorbachev muttered, We can no longer subsidize. Now I get

The Joke. Not even force, but cash, more stupid than steel

Of file cabinets/ rhetoric/ bayonets/ ships/ winter

Siberian factory towns and imported revolutionaries

Everywhere. Vertigo, earth swerving off its axis: only

Money, only money. With that, the union unzipped.

In a Warsaw kitchen,

a handful of women

risked their lives

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To publish a newspaper. Smuggled piece by piece across Europe,

Paper, ink, and printing press lived in their apartment.

Western trade unions sent money. All over Warsaw,

Police were searching for the rogue publishers. All over Poland,

Readers were turning their pages. All over Warsaw, spies and

Informants and comic police were searching. They thought sure it

was

Published by men, and they ransacked Poland. Meanwhile, in

the kitchen

What would become the Election Gazette was cooked, raw and true,

While stupid shock troops rummaged the country, sure it was men.

On the outskirts of what was important, an American president

was sworn in, 1/20

While Gorbachev was pulling troops, pulling bombs. In Hungary

Imre Pozsgay spoke words that retold history: that 1/29

Nineteen fifty-six, when a priest's hair went white,

Was not the official story--a failed counter-revolution--

But the unofficial truth (and isn't all truth, sexed

Body, whisper of magnetism, charm of quarks, unofficial?

Some singers say Plato had it right: truth a tale

Uncaring of tellers, awaits no confirmation); he said

Hungarians were martyred in a popular uprising--this from a

Communist.

What kind of turning-point was it? A ballerina en point, bruised

toe

Drilling through the stage floor to the molten center?

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March, hard month, storm, leaf, and light?

A hinge--a door opens--and there, revealed, is all

That darkness hid? A bend in the road that brings on

A treasure-embroidered land?

The first stone axe?

Or was that year a bothered eye closing, opening?

If these words could be said, anything could.

And that was January.

We knew more months were coming, more heroes, more dead.

February started in Paraguay, for thirty-five years the mortal

Playground of Alfredo Stroesser, thug. He'd stolen

presidencies,

But now a coup tripped him up. Coup coup coup, 2/3

Little to choose between sclerotic generalissimo and the

Medal-chests who putsched him and promised elections at an

unspecified time.

He retired to be rich and await trial on unspecified charges.

Sun is distant from Warsaw in winter, but Lech Wałęsa,

Nobel laureate shipyard electrician, underground president of

History's most beautifully-named trade union

(Solidarność), jailed under martial law, harassed by paranoid

Generals, mispronounced on American television, hauled sun near.

Seven years of sleep and Solidarity still was warm

Breath, human lips that spoke to Wojciech Jaruzelski 2/6

(Yet another general), cold man, Prime Minister,

Grey lifetime. If those two could speak, anyone could.

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Wałęsa’s greatness lay in his ugly brand of patience,

Aplomb amid flammable mobs. He'd seen endless uprisings

(Gdańsk Shipyards), knew Poles who'd kill to the last Pole.

Better to birth Poland's future with dogged speech.

Russia 2/15

slinked

from Afghanistan,

spat at the barren border.

In Czechoslovakia, a playwright who threatened (another dangerous

poet)

To turn the country free, Václav Havel, genius of

Grim persistence, was jailed. 2/22

From the schoolhalls of prayer, I ask,

Havel before twilit thousands, Wałęsa, jostled in drab halls,

Did you know--you must have known--you were whorls in the

Fingerprint?

Now I know why men of stone believed a Hand

Hasted them through time. They say, "They were made to do it."

Two sallow bourgeoises in poor coats called and

Nations responded, answered a prayer with exultation and death.

Poetry's too dangerous; that's why they threw Havel in jail.

Another week, and

February gone.

March was quiet,

If subterranean shifts, grinding of continental plates, the

screaming
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Inchwise csárdás of land masses is quiet. Pandora

Opened her legs. Her water burst, pelvis cracked,

Muscle and bone parted, the year headed down the canal.

In a Warsaw kitchen, women printed truth. Poland

Read it. Poland's moles burrowed everywhere, but

no luck.

April.

Georgia.

Sun was nearer. Chaos sang, 4/14

Deafened. Crowds. More crowds. Again, crowds. (That was a year of

Crowds on tiny screens. All year we watched, to be there,

Bound by strands of impulse through space, much as we imagined

In school our prayers bound us to heaven. Isolated/connected,

We shouted to the images, Stand firm. Remember: justice.)

None of the papers carried it, but there were Polish underground

markets

Selling anything to anyone in both Berlins. You could buy

Anything with enough black dollars. Surely the papers

Should have seen them, these indefatigable purveyors of anything,

Flim-flamming enough dough to send back home.

If anyone was going to have a revolution, they were.

Tblisi's streets 4/14

gagged with crowds. That old trick

Again, a Politburo favorite: shoot into their hearts.

In April sun of transition and no mercy, some fell,

And the world saw it on tape. They exaggerated the numbers, but
 11

the world

Saw. Georgia's leaders, terrified, stood down, fled.

Three days more, and, impossible in Poland, Solidarity unbanned.

Three more days, and we had to turn to the

other

Side of the world. There, too, perineum tore,

Lips wrenched, head crowned. China, that country

No song can cage--can prayer reach so far?--China, too.

Set down names, already chimes on the wind,

Traces on wood: Li Peng, Fang Lizhi, Hu Yaobang,

Wang Dan, Zhao Ziyang, Hou Dejian,

Xiao Bin, Ziao Hongliang, Li Jinghua,

And you, Chai Ling, on whose girl's shoulders fell

The leaden tread of revolution, who tried to think her way

Through to the Best of Ways, whose courage made her Commander in

Chief,

Defend Tienanmen Square Committee. At first, like Christ,

You refused . . . ill with conscience, you stood, resisted

revolts in the

Ranks, intrigues, cliques against claques. When some ran,

You called stand; when some said negotiate, you cried

firm.

When everyone ran or was gunned down, you took to the radio

Calling on all in ancient language to shed blood for

China.

Later, some would say, She was the reason

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So many died. Others would say, She was our soul.

Chai Lin, you live far from China now,

And I wonder how your conscience is. Does memory sear you,

Or do you think China grew fertile beneath the bloodshowers?

So many times you hesitated, but each time, clown and priestess,

You took the cup, the blame, the chance, the leap, the joke.

Oldsters

stymied on high in China. Bullhorn chorus,

Underground choir of mimeo posters, unauthorized flyers,

(Othello's unauthorized kisses), rumor a lucifer spurting

In a dynamite of anything. Millions and millions of bicycles,

bicyclists,

Students,

jeans,

shades,

rock 'n' roll.

Police scuttled them,

They were coming 4/20

from everywhere,

drunk with risk, as deer

Edge to drink at the dwindling pond where alligators cluster and

Wait for the margin to drag their prey within jawstrike. Thirst

against

Instinct,

innocents venture closer to the alligator heart,

The Forbidden City, Square of Heavenly Peace, gate of the

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Imperial Palace, where Mao had declared the People's Republic.

And while innocents approached, that very week, Gorbachev 4/25

Scraped fat clots from Russia's arteries: hardliners

Out of the Central Committee. No time to recover: two

Days later, millions filled Tienanmen Square.

Hu Yaobang shouted all day long to

Deaf warlords in council. His list of China's evils

Hour after hour brought a question: What do you have to say to

us?

Hu: We are failing the people of China. Next morning, his heart

Went black.

Four thousand students, coals glowing at a breath, placed

A banner for Hu, Soul of China, on the Martyrs' Monument.

At his funeral, fifty thousand, first wave, danger-drunk.

Boycott classes; call for talks. TV and the People's Daily

(Warlord ventriloquism) lashed out.

One hundred and fifty thousand

(Ventricle at diastole) marched;

five hundred thousand

Watched. Numbers, numbers. This place is good to speak of

The failure that changed China, those who believed too much.

May 1, national holiday, passed with students

Mortifying old men, spitting on their lie of order:

May said spring meant sorrow-too-long.

Tienanmen Square crested, a China within a China.

Old men who would win swore and wrangled.

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I need a breathing time between prayer and crippling denial in

China--so I go back to

Hungary, to

May 2.

An iron curtain shadowed my childhood. No one knows

Why we keep curtains, or why we let them down,

Or why we made up an iron one, more poetry and propaganda than

Telluric metal--we wanted to believe in it, wrote the checks

as

Required in the halls of business and coercion, Russia and my

country,

Everyone, greatest waste of human and natural resources

Ever anywhere, mountain range of Babels, an

Arsenal for a hundred wars, so few ever fought,

And we'll never have a cent of it back, no, not ever--could have

Rebuilt a hundred Bedford-Stuyvesants, trained a hundred

Trenton and Chicago slum schools in biotechnology,

Cleansed the air and water of a solar system, but we'll never

See any of it again. Instead, we terrified three

Decades of children and prepared them all for horror for

nothing.

When a man lets down his borders,

invites the other's delighted

Emigration into his country--when a woman lets down her borders,

And the other, within her privacy, has plain air, free walk--

It is an amazement of human magic. On the second day of May

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In this year, Hungary struck its iron curtain,

That sadness/sameness that had turned the Austrian border to a

Black and white photo. When men and women let down their

borders,

The forbidden becomes the frontier; now pioneering can start.

Return to China,

to May 4,

when seventy years

Before, students had arisen. Thousands, thousands, thousands.

Deafness on the dais. Fight, then, with famine, a few

Tents in Tienanmen, bikes, flags, buses spraypainted

With reasons for hunger. A mild bay ripple, a few

Hundred kids in the Cyclops eye of all humanity.

Sacrilege: resolute starvation in the Square and everybody saw,

Including Gorbachev, visiting China to renew relations,

Smiling with Raisa and Deng Xiaoping, squat and deaf.

Czechoslovakia: 5/17

they let Havel go. More dangerous

To jail poetry than let it out into the open where you can watch

it.

They said You can leave now

if you just sign here;

Thanks, he said, but no. Trap versus tact.

And so, in the comedy that the tragedy had become, they

let him walk.

Poetry out in the open. Memory. It was all over.

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In Beijing, 5/18

Wuer Kaixi, dauntless boy, shouted at

Li Peng an hour on TV. What are you trying

To tell us? didn't work on TV. 5/20-22

Orders to clear out. Starvers refused. Beatings, ambulances.

The Army marched out of the Great Hall of the People and found

The people ready to reason with them, gently resisting.

The Army sat and the people sat, had singing contests:

"The Three Disciplines and Eight Points of Attention";

"Without the Communist Party, There Will Be No New China"--

Respect sidled past impatience and squatted, uneasy, with irony;

Toward evening the Army marched back to the Great Hall of the

People.

The tent city where the stomach caved grew tenfold,

And a million people, the second wave, came in from the

provinces by

Train, got lifts to the Square on student motorbikes, student

Trucks, red flags waving, students believing, unripe

Fruit hanging.

Back to Europe for another breath, to

East German elections--so obviously rigged that the voters

Laughed down the shamed officials.

Fruit rotting.

When the heart

pumps against pressure too long, it dies.

Heart attack
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in China:

expulsion of all moderates from government 5/26

(the students should have

Run right then: crocodiles were stirring,

But thirst, thirst), and the chances of hundreds in Tienanmen

Square

Would die . . .

but how could they know that when they all

had fallen in love?

From a magazine cover

her face subdued me--the future's woman,

All colors seduced to tan; full eyes tapered;

Veldt walker, ice woman, boglander, tropics mother,

Their histories in her lips, taste, sense of surrounds.

She is, though I see her every day on the streets, not here yet

But a gantlet's end of time, change. You might well call her

Goddess of Freedom, sculpt her from blank plaster 5/30

As they did at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, tricycling her

In sections to Tienanmen Square. Put her together, artists,

Styrofoam, wood, East, West, windblown, clutching

A torch with left hand and right. Every newspaper in the

world

Renewed her eyeless stare at Mao Zedong's portrait

Outraged in the sacred square. She, standing there, had five

Days to live. Crowds took on body around her, washed around

her
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Feet. She, they locked, as key and receptor

Lock and the nexus changes in conformation,

Opens into new possibilities, she their sperm and they her

Zona pellucida. Lock: division, division, division

Along a relay of charge and exchange culminating in being.

Electric words of new things in China flew among them,

Sin of belief committed in the open. CNN, ABC,

NBC, CBS, BBC, CBC carried it everywhere,

A white shirt dazzle, students in dance of thrilled

suspense,

And what a shock. I was almost afraid to see it.

Change like this meant my world was dying. I tasted the old man's

Resentment at the future, his world taken away bit by bit--

Only a moment. A prayer was being answered, reply so complex that

Each thing was its opposite: these kids and their naive Woodstock

Awaited their massacre and triumph. The People's Army, even now

gathering and

Following orders, would slaughter them, end the old China.

For days after they built the Goddess, 5/30-6/2

dumb freeze among the leaders.

Uprisings were rumored in cities in the dusty, irretrievable

distance.

A farmer cudgeled the publicans who dared to tax his pigs.

Hydraulic pressure: people streaming into Beijing, soldiers,

Police, animals, cameras (the eye stayed open) squaring

Inversely as the volume. China had held its breath for centuries.
 19

Bursting lungs. Deer were drinking. Bold and on camera

(Tribunals watched the western shows to learn whom to kill),

Students lectured the government, waved books, and sang.

Police trucks wheeled about the streets. A few arrests.

Street merchants on motorbikes--they called themselves the

Flying Tigers--

Rode in and out of Beijing, reporting the movement of troops.

Both the mountain and

its shadow, 6/2

now the Army was assembling and

Rolling into the bursting town. They came to murder their

Countrymen if ordered. Encountered human walls, reaching out,

Calling them brother, reminding them of history.

Hands pulled soldiers down from the trucks, embraced, beat them;

Soldiers looked on with dead faces, wept with shame, begged.

Farmers, workers, laborers lay down in front of the trucks.

The people made an obstacle course out of the city,

Stole buses, trucks, cars, blocked the arteries.

A human whitewater surged at the trucks. People and soldiers

Stared. Stalled. Ache. Aura of unease. Rumors of

Tanks.

A mobile earthquake rolled. (Fear works,

Force works. Both turned billions to marionettes

Waving red books. But the sting rips out the guts

of the

Stinger.) Blind as steel, the slow smash scraped

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Aside the flattened bodies, auto corpses, burned-out

Wreck of resistance, probed, battered, ruined its way toward

the

Square. Thousands ran. Warnings chattered on loudspeakers.

The world press was harangued onto airplanes, the eye of the

world

Thumbed. Thousands stayed in the Square of Heavenly Peace.

Rumbles: a moraine of nightmare nights shoved ahead of the

Tanks. Machine guns squeezed off hundreds of lives as they

Came. The Square drained. Thousands ran screaming 6/4

Into the screaming streets, the screaming guns, the hospitals,

jails, their

Futures over. Some escaped. China ended its

History in cowardice. What else is a tank? I can't hear you,

I can't see you, I am all decision, swivel, steel.

You win and must be punished.

Look at what they did.

Or, rather, we can't look. We'll never see this clearly.

Some say the army and the students dickered the night,

And when dawn came, they let the few remaining wander

Home, to be arrested, tried, and erased later.

Some say that blood obeys the mass of the earth:

Two hundred students sat, some believing, some unbelieving,

Betrayed and ready in the Square. An ambient roar of

Metal injustice muffled them up. A warning of warnings.

They could have dragged them away, roped them, gassed them, but
 21

the comedy was,

Having bludgeoned their way thus far, they had to butcher.

In a vicious absurdity of deployment, fifty riflemen knelt in

their

Sight. Twenty paces. The old men thought

Nobody saw the next, but a Spanish camera crew

Got it. There is a word the newspapers use: atrocity.

From far away, the Spanish cameras caught the silence, the

Final warning, the order. Crack. A first row fell,

Were taken away. Another warning, order, crack--

Took away everything, turned a hopeful, fearful being to a

Slopped protein sack. Crack--brainflower, spasm,

Afterimage. Despair of a state: fire into the crowd.

Some say thirty died. Some say three hundred. It doesn't

Matter. They cleared the Square, and the unreason, the purge

began: the

Spreading green stain of the Army went after anybody,

Stabbed and strafed the night, gunning the alleys, invading the

Houses, torching the blocks. Some soldiers ran into

Traps. Their people caught them, beat them, hanged them,

beheaded them,

Burned them, and fled. Mao's China was over, but before the

Corpse stiffened up, the reflex kick would kill.

Unspeakable night in city and country, the People's Army

Raping past and future with sick fury of defeat,

Glutting the prisons, crippling the gallows, getting back on

 22

Top--tracers in darkness--scattered fires--anonymous

Anguish--who were they who died, cornered, shadowed,

Smothered, drowned, slit? When will a song tell

Their last seconds? When no one stops praying?

In the wasteful, indifferent attention with which all prayer is

answered,

Next dawn, the sun over China was a juddering bag of plasma.

If

history

is built in how we imagine,

how we pay out

Lines to one another--to bind, to rescue--

Then prayer is answered in both dream and act, in every

Soul that ever lived and in its wake, not only

Some aggregate backmind but also its dragnet of ricochets,

From first lightfall in the clearing of the infant mind. Answer

Is asymptote, replying though withdrawing though nearing though

deflecting.

Our lives are not a passage of moments we happen to own

But brim with other lives lived otherwise. We kiss and grieve

Along chains billions long. We send all beyond us;

No oblivion. More than us remembers. Live

As though each act were rapt in the utter radiosity of cause.

I think he lived like that,

the pedestrian,

the one who seemed

 23

Just crossing the road,

intent on getting to work, mindless of the

Column of tanks leaving the stifled heart of Beijing. But

See: in mid-jaywalk

he seemed to come to,

midstreet,

Turn to face his brother the tank, which bore a space of

Roar and desolation toward him (behind it, fifty more) and

He was

enough to stop them.

He stood, he

reasoned,

would not

Let them go.

I would sing your name

If any knew it. When all was gunfire, you said, Brother,

Tell me, why did it happen?, asking the world's question.

Tanks stalled, column halted, you reasoned.

That was the year, man and tank, men in machines.

You would move on, the year roll like tanks, but before your

Friends dragged you away, your need to know halted armies.

Nineteen eighty-nine crested in that conversation,

The fallible embrace of words asking tanks why,

Word whizzing into the universe, receding down the

Chain of excuses. I know what he asked, but I can't hear the

answer.
 24

My passions are Changan Avenue gagged with motors and corpses.

My will is millions rioting in the flash-lanced night; my drives

are what

Happens to voices, limbs, when there is nothing to believe,

Breathe, be, when love is the light of a vanished nebula.

Know this: We are afraid history makes sense,

Afraid of human goodness and its awkward burden of love.

You who stood and reasoned with tanks, I thank you for reminding

me.

That was the first forepang of the climactic change, which has

come

Gradually, feminine climax, these six years and more.

Mao, 1996

wake up.

Money-making rides the bicycles.

China is

Connecting to the world it could always imagine away before.

A grip has relaxed, though coercion still whips its steel tail.

Each Tienanmen anniversary, the Square is hustled closed.

Protest? People know better. You'd have to be crazy. Make money.

Why risk everything when change goes on by itself? Grief

Not yet cooled for the blasted children of the uprising. Many

Farm in distant prisons. Some fled West, where they

Shiver in the strangeness. Others pull their China over their

heads.

Why, still grieving, heap more grief?

 25

Why not

make money?

Does

history

have any

meaning?

That depends.

Is meaning

More like mass and entropy, or more like lust or hunger?

More like angles of light, seducing with death in October,

Or more like Picasso's gaze at a woman before the stroke?

With consciousness, time, and language bent to the same axle,

We are meaning machines. As the spider pays out the ductile

Web to rig the bough, as the owl prowls night

Territory, brilliant in his domain, as walls of river bulk up to

the

Edge of Niagara and plummet in a choiceless roar,

meaning--

This constant narrator, this portable audience--is what we do,

Our tropism, our green turning toward the light.

No madwoman in chains in prison, no genius corseted in

libraries, No one stands outside the

unsilenceable. Like the electrical wave

That readies the heart for each beat, what has ever happened

Replays in billions of hearts, washing over the world.

(Nothingness is not what we face.

 26

We face the multifarious

Jugglery of the real, the multiverse, its choir of throats.)

I can see why anyone, faced with the story as it is,

Would retire to their lives, say, Isn't this--haven't we done--

Enough? Not this too. Who could

Live so mindful? Live all lives as our own

When our own are so hard to catch? Isn't history one more

suffering,

One more wave of noise, envelope requesting cash?

Where's our shovel? Give us a corner of shade for digging.

The suburbs are the organized denial of history, but

even there

We seamsters--desire the needle, memory the thread--are

Making a Joseph's coat of meaning to wear in the world.

Time and mind and history are made of the same material,

One another. (Geese fly, locked in flock

Consciousness: one dips, all dip.)

Watching that year on TV, I learned among the ghosts:

Time whispers, without a whence or a whither, its many whys.

History is our time-lapse film, of how branches branch, how they

Arborize, dendritify. Watching the movie, we want the movie.

Remembrance waters desire, and up springs that sunflower,

longing.

A man turns into a hound alone at night with the moon,

A woman to a jilted photograph mourning the desertion of color.

My son was Christ. Each one of us came out of Egypt--

 27

Not that the past builds up to us, or that we are the answer,

But that we stand in relation, and know better when we

triangulate.

History comes to tell us this: our lives

mean in

Chaoses giving rise to the play of relations. A.R. Ammons

I'm no

Expert. Maybe loss, the sea, the stars, town seen from a

mountaintop,

Are strangers everywhere in the universe except the storyteller

mind.

Or maybe all things are related, and all we do is say so. But

In the space and time of history, minds change, you know. They

Did in Wenceslas Square, the Kremlin, Tienanmen,

Brandenburg

Gate.

With the storm out of China, we barely heard that the

Ayatollah Khomeini, 6/3

Priest of bitterness, bully of God, clock-strangler, had

Died.

Years come, years go, but promises

Stay. In Poland they promised a free vote--no, 6/4

Really. We were going to wonder if it would ever happen, when in

Hungary they dug up Imre Nagy's bones, bore them to a 6/17

Place called honorable. His blood, like the blood

That dyed the Olympic Pool in nineteen fifty-six,

 28

Inked the invisible, taught us what bore us up, what we knew too

Little.

God, what a June.

And the underground traders from

Poland, those

Tireless tramp entrepreneurs, hawked their stuff before the

Brandenburg Gate.

That July, the globe warmed (summer

Too was a promise); in the lands of vacation, everyone fled

Except the Polish traders snagging a few tourists.

In their stalls, their mirrors with snakeskin borders, hot boom

boxes,

Bob Marley T-shirts, they were buying and selling the realest

revolution.

The tourist dollar helped topple the guard towers, snip the

Razor wire--and the guts of the garrison state ruptured.

But that July, it was not underground bucks alone,

Not universal passion to own limousines or star in

Movies.

This too: the wish of this animal to flee evil,

Take the full chance of life.

July began

To flee East Germany, take refuge in West German Missions

In East Berlin, Prague, Budapest. Those who could

Escaped into Austria over the rifted Hungarian

Border--
 29

fingers slipped under the blouse, stroking the forbidden

Against the will of the past, softening granite will,

Raising cold aureole, erecting nourishment out of

No--

Cleansing breath of July was strained with guilt over China.

In Poland,

Jaruzelski allowed a paper to be published. Out of the

Kitchen it came: The Elections Gazette. Underground now

overground.

The women kissed and continued; the moles were reassigned.

Not until

the August shadows

began to lean

toward winter

Did that sockdolager summer resurrect.

In Czechoslovakia, 8/21

A feast day drew thousands. Twenty-one years before, the treads

Flattened a cup full of sunlight, the calyx of the Prague Spring.

Everyone remembered. Alexander Dubček was still alive.

So was Míloš Jakeš; so was Gustáv Husák.

Back in January, Spring out of season, bullets brought winter--

So now in August they marched and sang and remembered in the

Humid promise of August, the pre-eclampsia of August

(The year would squeeze off more dead before long), in that

pressure summer

Stunning a baking world.

 30

A midwife dips her finger into

Warm oil, runs it around the lips, the head,

A tender encouragement: they marched, to say they remembered, to

Let the state know. Remembrance, the finger, the oil.

Later, the joyful parting, tearful push into the future. Now

Hands joined across Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania; the 8/23

Action potential of memory surged along a human chain,

Three cultures remembering their erasure (in the face of tyranny

Memory is an insult).

Next day, in Poland, a promise was kept.

Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Solidarity man, elected prime minister.

Jaruzelski was still there, tumor behind the gland, but

How much the air had changed. Polish voted, Polish

Elected. Jaruzelski, rendered president rendered irrelevant

Before the doubtless will of Poland and Russia's bankruptcy.

In East Germany, they pushed to found a democratic Party.

Before long, they'd call it New Forum. Many

Laughed at New Forum, the way a child does

What it hopes wins praise--but Bärbel Bohley, doctor and

Clown, led the nigglers, ticklers, hecklers, prayers.

I tried, millions tried, not to hope too hard.

I prayed, millions prayed, so hard the prayers stopped being

Words. Could the world really be changing? Could we be seeing

our dreams yet

Not be dreaming? Prayers tell you when dreams are important.

Let me
 31

for a moment

dream that all births are happy,

beginning

With a wife's smile, her loving relaxation, a tender parting

Of borders, and a husband's loving restraint in moving between

her

Lips, a gentle, appropriate engagement; that these two move

Through metamorphic fire, pain that makes her hate him,

To a second parting, reminder of the brutality of fate, and of

the animal,

Until all is forgotten when the infant, fragrant and

slippery with vernix--

Perfect, tiny fingers working, lips in an O--is

Lifted down to her breast.

I dream of the easing of borders

Because of opponents turned friends, skeptics turned

supporters--the stranger who led to a

Smile to a caress to a union to a daughter to a son. These: the

Strongest sweets of my life. (When the borders fell, we were

scared:

What next? We had to build. For all its disappointments and

failures,

The newborn world was better. Better birth than an old world.)

September:

we'd already had the first draft,

the wolf's-eye blue

 32

Sky

foretelling autumn, when, at six o'clock on

September 11, midnight Budapest time, I heard the

Radio:

Hungary has opened its borders

--when a woman opens hers,

it

Makes up for being a man--wait--was I asleep?--

Sat up. Without TV, I saw, thousands of miles away,

Cities of doors ajar, families crowding the trains,

Traffic jams down through East Germany to the border

With Austria. Burst aneurysm; lifeblood fleeing the brain;

Blown bulkhead, and the ship tilting. Smile, caress

Into a newborn.

Let no one tell you otherwise: those who

Actually fled made the revolution, those who decided,

Split their households, sent their children ahead alone

Onto the gesticulating trains, to meet again or not

(Go to this address and meet me there, if there

Is an address. Meet me at the ominous station where nobody

Comes to meet you. Meet me in the streets of a stranger town.

Meet me in the somnolent warehouse districts, the distorted

trainyards.

Meet me on the blocks where you no know one, where families are

outlawed,

Where your soul and language are foreign, where breathing is

 33

perplexity, where the

Church steeple tilts and the towers bear down. Meet me ),

Drove all night, lied and bargained at the checkpoints, wandered

Tent cities in Budapest looking for one another, who

Shacked with strangers, looking for one another, in Vienna, who

Became, looking for one another, a drag on the system, who

Completed the U (looking) in West Germany (for one

Another), where their language (looking for), not their

history

(One), was spoken (another), are the ones this poem should

praise.

Why credit anyone else? In six weeks, fifty thousand

Would plunge into the cold of not knowing. They lost everything

looking

And made everything back for one another. In a wrack-line

Riding the tide, bright ruin on a black wave,

Desperate and resolute against forces no one can name or control,

They were the ones who fought and (one another) won

Whatever hold on a future and a difference they could. I give

them

A poem. That's all I've got. I did nothing but watch from

Here, where nothing was happening.

Hungary opened its borders,

And since Hungary bordered on Austria and Austria on the rest of

the world

And the moon of money pulled and the ocean of history swelled
 34

And Russia had nothing left,

down came the hurdles;

the guards

Were reassigned;

in peaceable chaos,

thousands and thousands and thousands

Obliterated memory of borders, fled into newborn fright.

The news was

the tanks that did not roll,

orders that were not

Given,

reprisals that stayed at home.

Only the relaxation, the

Discharge, the broadcast of seed.

This was when you heard, on

American streets, It's really starting to happen, as if

It were January, not September, as if our saying made it real.

Even this place, where leaders are paid to keep things

Quiet, even this place took on the charge

Building in Europe as the unearthly/inevitable suffuses through

Loins on the verge--a climax tide of families, single

Men, single women, lost sons, lost

Daughters (my son my daughter my mother my father), exodus/

Ejaculation/prolapse/hegira.

Hungary was the woman whose

Smile and relaxing gladdened Europe, made grateful as

 35

Men are grateful. And the woman did more: she promised a free

Vote. Imre Pozsgay again: a multiparty system.

When will we all admit it? Some promises are fulfilled.

(Cynics take a convenient speedway. Not for them the

Local route called human goodness. Bends in the road,

Curves, switchbacks: too long, the business route.

But if humanity can name the good and work toward it,

History isn't simple, fate only a nickname for

What we do in an open world. Goodness tastes like

Chaos, taking a course you can name only afterward, God's

Will, as they used to call it, as it yet may be,

Aggregate of the achievements of good men and good women. Dostoevskii

Craft a prayer out of subject, verb, object:

Time travels, as far as we know, in one direction.)

September: thousands in Leipzig.

Six thousand refugees

Crammed and expectant in the West German embassy in Prague

Were let go--and special trains, nails across the face of

Communism, crossed East Germany and let them off in the West.

For weeks they came, the wanderers,

and kept coming,

in farmtrucks,

In coughing Trabants, in the jammed trains. They

slept in the streets,

In the squares. They walked. They burdened the Red Cross, the

relief
 36

Organizations. East Germany said good riddance to the

Malcontents, criminals, unwanted. But day told and night

Retold that everyone was leaving. In the free cities of Europe,

They marched to remember those turned wastrels for freedom,

And in the bound cities: in Leipzig they gathered

Monday

Nights,

and the crowds grew and grew; in Prague no curfew could

Stanch the assemblies; in Bucharest, they picketed and were

arrested;

In Moscow, they marched and were not.

In American newspapers, a fever of

Rumor, reportage, long-distance confusion. Where were the

Armies? We're waiting for the bullets.

October: Indian summer.

Hotter.

East Germany, nostalgic for oppression, declared its

Borders closed. (When a woman does that, nothing can make

A man sadder.) Eric Honecker was still head of state.

He'd fought Hitler, died for a decade in prison, emerged as a

Communist savior. Now he was sick, like the country that had

Never been his. Having become what he'd fought, Honecker

Gored where he'd bled. Troops and tanks were summoned,

As were the Stasi, secret police sworn to defile in the name of

purity,

As was that traditional mask of thieves, the passive voice.

 37

We let go of September as we let go of summer.

Monday, October 2: fifteen thousand in Leipzig.

Who told them to come? What did they think would come of it?

Where do new ideas (what else is life?) come from?

Fifteen hundred refugees in the West German embassy

(Warsaw this time) were let go west. Seven thousand and six

hundred

More glutted the Prague embassy. Dark words and threats--

More special trains, slaps in the face, took them west.

October hell for Honecker. Younger men muscling

Him and his cancer aside. Marathons through dingy nights,

Harangues in the endangered halls. Whingeing phonecalls.

Honecker held on by

Name alone. Reports of defiance with a hundred thousand

Heads. The Stasi, spinal cord without a brain,

Murdered, jailed, and betrayed

as in China

on this October.

In Leipzig, torches, placards, bullhorns: it looked like Prague,

Looked like Beijing, looked like Tblisi, Kraków, Budapest,

Bucharest, Kiev, Sofia, Belgrade.

Honecker denied it,

Terrified, but I happen to know that throughout the world people

were

Praying.

He wrestled with the younger men, who no longer

 38

Cared whether Communism lived. They were just plugs longing for

the

Outlet. (We give power all its names, when it is always

Only men wrestling.)

Gorbachev came to visit.

On October 7, all over East Germany, they tried to remember

The fortieth anniversary of the Great Mess and make it the last.

Novel response: security forces, arrests, sirens,

Warnings to disperse.

Two days later, Monday again,

And, as if a meeting had been called of some gigantic club,

Leipzig

Doubled. There were no streets, just heads and shoulders, no

bricks,

Just song. Most glorious time in a city's equivocal history.

Seventy thousand people/candles lit up Leipzig,

An open dare in the open eyes of the open world.

Students and bankers, naives and bourgeoises,

the impassioned

and the just plain

Sick of it all, they wandered into the same streets

Together. Good things can happen together. Ask the woman who

Relaxes her borders, the man who crosses, the billions in

churches.

In Leipzig they marched until there were too many, and then they

Stood, body to body, the city a body together.

 39

That night they found something new to raise, not swords, not

signs, but

Candles. Exposed to the night, tiny silk flames

Held in ten, twenty, sixty, eighty, one hundred

Thousand, three hundred thousand hands. A forest fire of

Leipzig grew as Beijing had grown. Pinpoints. Candles.

As I feel through the dark house, I hold a candle before me.

Night has turned all the ways I know to an obstacle course.

Couches crouch; doors are fists for my eyes.

Trust to my little light. Guide me, tent of flame.

A candle is a prayer against all that is not light.

October 9, day of light in history. Leipzig:

Bodies. Bodies. Breathing bodies. Burning bodies.

Everybodies.

Bold from their sweep of two days before,

Henchmen arrived,

made grand drama of their assembly,

The rolling out of the implements, discussions of strategy,

and in fact the

Crowds were frightened, but they couldn't disperse. This new

Body was too thick. They and their candles stood.

They enticed the police, blessed and mocked and sang to the

police.

Tienanmen had worked, and they all knew it. Could work again,

And they all knew it. The bullets had the thugs, and they all

knew it--but
 40

There was nowhere to go with walls of everybody breasting one

another,

So terror passed

from crowd to criminals,

important and powerless.

Stalemate minutes dwindled the dick of power, swelled the

Congress of every candleman and candlewoman aflame in Leipzig.

In that blessed paralysis, candles burned, not bullets.

Song: No other Tienanmen. Era's end

--In South Africa, 10/15

a budge:

Walter Sisulu was released from the

burning

Tire of prison. A corner of mercy crumbled off the monolith; in

Nineteen ninety, after 26 years, Nelson Mandela would

Go free--then, soon, the long, particolored

Lines of voters. History writing. Apartheid snuffed--

That very day,

an awards ceremony in West Germany.

Winner of The Peace Prize of the German Book Trade:

Václav Havel. The authorities detained his body,

So he sent his soul in an essay: "A Word about the Word."

Helmut Kohl, Chancellor of West Germany, sat with

Richard von Weizsäcker, President, in the front row,

An empty seat between them.

Next day, being a Monday,

 41

Meant Leipzig, the demo, a hundred thousand candles,

Tongues as of a Paraclete, an intercessor.

Each candle

Was the tongue of its holder, prayer on the tongue of its

holder, tongues of

Such fire as is not mortal, not material--

Each of us intercedes for herself, for himself--

Words, go-betweens, breaths, spirit made fire

To the spirit in light, to our own spirit, or to another,

Or to Another.

Leipzig was where it began.

It ended:

Next day, October 18, Honecker resigned, to be interviewed,

Prosecuted, buried.

Egon Krenz was his successor.

In Leipzig, fever flashed into delirium. On October 23,

Hungary proclaimed the new Hungarian Republic. To celebrate,

Three hundred thousand candles flared in Leipzig,

Thugs

nowhere

anywhere. They ran

from the crush of that quiet

Embrace that would fold them in forgetting, gentlest

punishment.

All we have to do is stand together and hold

Light together. All we have to do is pray

 42

Together. No wonder no one does it. Once, I saw monks

Stagger to noontime mass, overalls smeared with labor

They'd done since dawn in the fields, worldless slavery to the

Word. I

Saw I couldn't,

not fearless, not strong,

not worthy, not me,

but

They, Leipzig show what we have to do and why

No one does--

so did Peter Fechter's bloody

Passion and murder. In nineteen sixty-two, he was 8/17/62

Eighteen. Borders madden a man, hedge him, shadow him,

And he couldn't, bricks, wire, soldiers, bear this new one

Sundering Berlin from Berlin, Germany from Germany, so much the

Wall of walls they capitalized its name.

He tried to climb it

Near Checkpoint Charlie, lay in the barbed wire, shot and

Calling, taking a writhing hour, child into corpse.

His German murderers watched. American MPs watched.

Crowds on the Western side, free, frozen, watched.

They saw how fear can seal the world. The guards gave him

His hour and dragged his body away.

Five hundred others,

One by one, over thirty years.

So there was still work to

 43

Do in Leipzig. Something was winning, but it had to keep winning.

After so long, sensitive documents, delicate instruments,

Scripted confessions, so many ice-locked promises, no one

Wanted to stop praying. Only

a forest fire of candles

could

Gentle out the past,

only the forest that sings

What all true lovers learn to sing--Ich liebe

Euch doch alle. I know everything,

And in spite of all I know, because of all I know,

Nevertheless, even so, yet, yes.

Pine forests of the human soul sing in the wind of

Such knowledge, and wind friction forces the flame of

Love-in-spite-of-it-all, without which there can be no love of

Our species.

Filia:

least-spoken love, embarrassing

Leg of the Greek trifecta eros, agape, filia;

We close our mouths against this most obliging love. In

Leipzig, they knew and said they knew and loved anyway,

Lit candles to say so. In spite of it all,

No one stopped praying.

He who comes too late

Is punished by life--Gorbachev's words, and he should know.

He was the clown of greatness

 44

tunneling under himself

While bigtop crowds beyond him, knowing in darkness what he

Cannot, applauds his jests as the ground beneath him caves.

He wrote himself into the comic role of floodgate keeper.

No Keaton doing splits between dock and rowboat could do it

Better. Now that his words had wedged the gate open, he was

Condemned always to arrive too late and say what had already

Happened.

On October 26, he praised October for having

Been October--endorse the recent developments in Europe.

On Christmas in nineteen ninety-one, he'd resign a Presidency no

longer

His, dissolve a Union already breached beyond him.

On time, he'd come too late again, and life got out the

Whip.

To Czechoslovakia

two days later

(October of

Octobers), seventy-one years old, crossroads country,

Hungarian/Slovak, German, Czech, Hitler's bauble, then

Brezhnev's.

Lakes,

springs,

what flows,

what is forced up under

Pressure.
 45

You protest with your feet

one of two ways:

Stand (Leipzig) or run (two thousand a day from East Germany,

Three hundred and fifty thousand, another Leipzig, in

Nineteen eighty-nine). In Czechoslovakia, many had

Always stood. Their poets, their singers, their students used

their

Arts to clown forth the truth of their long sorrow.

They had tasted rape of tanks, extorted smut of industry,

Official godlessness. Their month was not yet, but

Their November began October twenty-eighth. In Prague,

they

Gathered to allude to Czechoslovakia's ambivalent birthday.

Here came the police again, clowns of mortality, and as if

Leipzig did not exist (the blind will still be blind

In a forest of candles), they sowed intimidation until

Order was, as they say, restored.

In cabs and coffeeshops of

Prague, the long stand continued.

October died in

Light in Leipzig. Mass and gravity, momentum, attraction,

Four hundred thousand people/prayers/candles.

Before the year moves to November,

I want you to think of Leipzig.

Most of our lives we are creatures who wear necessity as our

skin.
 46

We have to live as we do, so we do. It is not heroic.

Perhaps it is a little, let's say, humiliating, let's say,

Shameful. Necessity is a combine whose wheels mow down souls--

Or is this our grey fairy tale? Perhaps no act is ever

Only for ourselves.

Before you answer, think of your answer.

Leipzig's chandlers burned 10/30

(and they knew it) for Prague and

Beijing,

Krakow and Riga. If they burned knowing (martyrs who survived)

(Ich liebe Euch doch alle), what is a bourgeois?

And then, 11/4

in November,

falling month when the past collapsed,

A true nation-in-a-square arose, one million in Berlin,

Star-headed, storm-voiced, uncertain and thrilled. One million

People at night in one place gives the air motive;

Voices and footfall at elbow cascade with mass voice,

Mass step. What is hard to say is how each

Voice spoke to itself before it spoke with the mass, how

Each step took itself before the heavens

Strode in the street. They marched for themselves and for

Leipzig too,

To ask a question. For weeks, the black clot had held

Against the swell, but on November the first, East Germany

reopened
 47

Its border with Czechoslovakia.

Two days after that,

No more special formalities at the borders--

raising a question

Voiced and revoiced by the million in Berlin on the night of the

fourth--

Why, then, a Wall? Heavens walked the streets and asked it

(This was a revolution of asking, not shooting; of praying, not

smashing)--

Why dam a river that drains the other way?

Rivers flowed

Across suddenly obsolete borders;

they marched in Berlin, and the

Wall stood, its own question, its own answer.

Our

Daughter

watched the news. In the twilight room, shadows of

News waved like a pine bough in a November storm.

She asked words that were, if any were, a

Prayer: Daddy, is this good? I said I believed

It was. She thought so too. In the windows flickered images of

Images of bodies like stars/prayers/candles/questions;

Announcers said meanwhile meanwhile, each here with its there--

Could this be the year we were told of, when all the prayers

were answered?

I told our daughter how they'd made us pray in the days of

 48

Dawn and dusk anxiety, comic book predictions,

Mushrooming paragraphs, codes, counterspies, jammed

communications.

We knelt in our classrooms, afraid as ordered, prayed as told.

Our daughter gazed: millions on television, on the windows,

in the shifting

Dark.

Maybe this is the year, our daughter told me.

Antiphonal:

one million in Berlin, five hundred thousand in

Leipzig. Half millions. Millions. 11/6

Those who stayed and

Those who crossed borders, feet answering feet,

Sentences in mirror form.

I have held it off long enough.

Restraint is sweet but tiring; when time comes, we

Must do as time does.

When a man thinks he loves a woman

But just before he tells her--just before she tells him--

They meet, they talk, they are shy, they are excited, their

senses report a

World of power and color--but they do not tell each other,

Not yet. They and time have not arrived. They part, to

Turn it over, this new jewel found in the road.

They have not said it yet, they do not dare say it

Even to themselves, but they know they will, they know it has
 49

happened;

Within themselves they feel murmurs as of great engines,

Inevitability, chaos, fate. It is all too much, fragile,

And so they are content to be still in the throes of great

reverberations--and

That is how we were for five days, after the million in

Berlin, Leipzig's reply of half a million, after

East Germany relaxed its border with Poland--we knew it was

Happening. We and this great motion shared a center, yet we

Went to work, as those in love must go to work;

History put, as love must be, in the background--

But just as the man and woman know

there is a body they have yet to

Know, we knew there was a Wall that had yet to--

and fell.

Never in history had the breach of a wall united a city;

We'd lain siege to the armored towns, catapulted boulders,

Riven gaps by force majeure, exposing the townspeople, but

Never in history, such a bitter and joyful dismantling.

Our daughter said, 11/9

Daddy, they took down that evil wall you told me about

And the bad people don't have power anymore. I didn't

Believe her; I turned on the television. Backsides ground

In Levis. Kids sang, spraypainted slogans in rock and

Roll, taking hammers to it, crowbars to it, kicking it,

Climbing it (Peter Fechter couldn't), pulling others

 50

Up--

cut to checkmated guards at Checkpoint Charlie,

Letting crowds past to exult and party and above all

Shop.

Images on tape,

by satellite from Europe,

signals

Caromed, compressed and reprocessed;

colors garish, shouts

And songs overloading; lights leaving burn trails in the

Festive evening. Germans walked a Germany unknown;

Friends embraced, long wall-estranged; sons and

Fathers, mothers, daughters, cousins, Germans embraced

Germans. The camera eye got

lost in the crowd.

Where

Were we now? Kissing in a square; drinking champagne in the

Streets of Berlin; singing in a smoky pub;

shoulders

Cattling past the camera. Germans just beholding one

Another.

I could not tell our daughter what this meant--

I'd woven my own shroud of meaning around that wall;

Others had taught me how, and I'd waited all my life

To watch it come down. How could I tell her how dark the

schoolhalls had
 51

Been the day our priests said, You: be ready to

Die as martyrs if it comes. You will be received

Immediately into heaven? I rehearsed my nothingness. My parents,

My brothers and sisters, my school, my town, my country, laid

waste

Because of the distant faceless. I made fists

Puny in the westering darkness. Those years were a dream,

Viscous landscape, shadows in paranoid black, spidery

Caricatures. I ran to get home some nights. Stayed awake in bed.

I prayed as told for thousands of millions enslaved.

I pictured

Children like me. What sports did they play? What books did they

read?

Who did they pray for? Some of my classmates asked me, Do you

Think it'll happen? Tough guys said they didn't care:

Armageddon. Right. I knew that the world was working beyond

my

Knowledge. How could I save it? Why did my mother and father

Go to work?

And here, anticlimax intertwined

With climax, it fell to the German kids

to make fun of it all.

They clowned it well,

burlesqued the high seriousness, reminded us

That we who built the Wall did not deserve to breach it.

Ceremony begone. Fan of Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Marceau,

 52

I liked being told my fear was a chimaera, as I had always

Known. In the hands of the kids, the Wall went from symbol to

shit

In a party that, true to carnival, proclaimed its own

forgetting.

(As kiss forgets fight, revolutions are made to be

forgotten.

If Prague is a chi-chi shopping center now, if Leipzig

Has breakfast and gets to work, if Berlin worries about bills,

Those things are what the revolutions earned.)

I liked being told I'd be forgotten

As I watched our daughter dance along with the televised

wallbreakers.

And on that night,

November 9, nineteen eighty-nine,

They reversed the Babel story

and began to speak a new language.

Einheit was its mother-noun. No one had been suggesting

Anything like oneness, but once a border falls,

We find out what we've been thinking

(man and woman,

Having pushed past an uncertain point to elation,

Say things they've never said or

thought of saying).

Now

They spoke of Einheit in the streets of East and West Berlin,

 53

Still East and West.

Sentences changed: what was once

Wir sind das Volk was now Wir sind

Ein Volk.

To make one where there was two

We must have fusion, fiction against fission, to unleash energy

Into a slowing cosmos.

I do not think we will ever

Have a world without borders--what I want will never

Be. But from November 9, the meaning of borders

Changed, from outrage of coercion to pique of difference.

Germany would

Not become Ein this year, but next. The Wall had been broken,

Nightmares stilled, and our daughter danced in not my world

but

Hers.

(A President claimed credit for the wall crumbling. No one

Listened. It wasn't crime and taxes. He's an unemployed

millionaire.

Laugh, history, at the old men taking credit at a distance.

At Francis Fukuyama--The future ends with us.)

Next day, 11/12

in Bulgaria,

Todor Zhivkov

was thrown out.

Three more days, and Hans Modrow was appointed 11/13

 54

Prime Minister of East Germany. He spoke open

Words, relaxed language, unified sentences. By being

Open, by relaxing, we get closer to

one.

Next day,

In Namibia,

lower right corner of Africa, long

Germany's plaything, then South Africa's, the UN 11/14

Ran the first election, and

who won? SWAPO, after

Twenty-three years of bush fighting, with Castro's help, for

Independence.

It must have been contagious. A country

Never before on its own--but they wanted it, they wanted it, and

they'd

Get it next year.

If this November wasn't the

Greatest of all, tell me another.

Only a week the

Wall had been down, when--and how

are these things decided?

. . . No one decides . . . they happen . . . in flares,

disjunctions, gaps

Blown in the wall of time . . .

but Foucault was wrong if he saw

Only the irrational. Times become right. Suffering builds,

 55

Slowly at first, here and there, rising imperceptibly, but

Gaining, until it spikes, and the line explodes vertically

off the graph--

Eight days after the Wall was breached,

Czechoslovakia--where

Deep, sweet aquifers, spring pressures, hydraulic

Persuasions

surface

what quenches the thirst,

makes you drunk--

Took its turn with the future.

My autumns have been momentous.

In pumpkin light, climaxing fields, the heavy afternoons

When life strains to burst and be over, I have heard

The grand chord and the echo in the empty hall, the ultimate

And the moment after the ultimate, and neither has disappointed.

Autumn has taught me that things come round to their

appointments.

No wonder

We light the bonfire, spread the feast, play the ghost.

No autumn

more momentous

than this autumn, of cold nights, velvet,

Poets made leaders--

and the praise I write is tempered, for

I know
 56

What happened later, one state made two, reverse of Germany,

Slovakia and Czech Republic, uncertain way forward.

Yet this is the greatest praise, to say uncertainty was worth it,

That we'd rather be free to walk uncertain than forced for sure.

This is history, not storybook.

The real world is hard;

no one

Wants to read those papers. But we should cherish the world

As it is, know it that way. That is what

The Velvet Revolution earned-- 10/17

that most disorganized revolution,

Students arguing with farmers, writers with middle managers,

Folk singers and their damned guitars, poets, actors,

Anyone, everyone, taking the task into new corners,

Not particularly in touch

but working approximately together

As sometimes it happens that a succulent sends down roots, and

another

Weed prospers somewhere else, and miscellaneous seeds

Light on unpromising ground and thread and insinuate and extend

Their grip, until, by a collusion of chance and what organisms

do,

Green covers enough ground, some coefficient of physics is

Equalled--and chaos secures the hill against erosion.

(Sometimes, man and woman, out of touch, work together.)

Since Hitler, Czechoslovakia had been punished for praying--but

 57

lately the

Churches of Prague had reverberated on every possible

anniversary,

Any pretext for gathering, for saying all soon would be over.

All year police had been beating the same five thousand

people,

Faithful demonstrators, avid petition signers,

Willing to go where police said no, familiar with jails,

Indefatigable writers of manifestos, whippers of crowds;

Now, with Havel free, poetry unleashed on the world,

They needed a way to get everyone else to come out, to make

Prague their Leipzig

(that city still burned every Monday).

Words were published, and the words people read

changed their minds;

Candescence of conscience poured molten into the molds of

thousands of souls,

Hardened into an alloy of resolve that shone and resisted the

urge

To forget the whole thing. Poetry, for once, did what it could.

November 17 was their best chance.

Some corpses are

Dangerous. Fifty years before, Jan Opletal,

A student, had fallen in demonstrations against the Nazis

To come to this point. His bones were dangerous. Wherever

they lay,
 58

Instant shrine. So they dug him up, the authorities in charge of

Death and living, they moved him out of Prague, to secret

Boneyards, but word got out. After fifty years, memory was

Habit.

A Jan in January. Another Jan in November.

They applied for the required permit, scheduled the usual

demonstration.

Fine, said the authorities, but Wenceslas Square is off limits

(That is where your soul is; visitation rights denied).

Twenty thousand students went along in their nice demonstration,

Coloring within the official lines, the police spectating.

In

Every move toward climax, even, I think, in dreams,

Someone, sometwo, somemany make a decision--or maybe

Decisions descend as messengers into the brains of prophets,

Who riot, who force the blaze.

Or maybe

climax comes

By itself,

a magic.

Wherever turnings come from, snaps in the

Cells, kicks in the spinal cord, here it came:

Fifteen hundred

bolted

for Wenceslas Square

to visit their
 59

Soul, and the police, as if there had been no January, no

Leipzig,

Billy-clubbed, tear-gassed, trucked them off. Hundreds to

hospital, and a

Useful rumor that one had died.

How much a year can

Change the world. Even in January, marchers could be slaughtered

in the

Usual procedure.

But now, with nineteen eighty-nine nearly

Gone, it seemed played out, the old totalitarian

Endgame. All year the world had been saying it couldn't work

Anymore--and even where they were wrong (China), something was

Irrecoverably dead.

So they stuffed the jails with students and

Waited for the usual protests to crest and fall back . . .

Crested . . . crested . . . quiet tsunami of the repressed

(overnight,

Hans Modrow spoke of a treaty of community in Germany.

What an idea: that if we stand together, if we open to the

World the question of what is right, something will happen).

Next night, at the Realistic Theater, dramatists discussed a

strike.

Painters and sculptors joined them. Havel wrote the script,

Stage directions, characters, even the lines to be spoken.

Call it Civic Forum: Whoever feels he's a member

 60

Is.

They met in theaters, in the Magic Lantern, on tiny

Dark stages. Word got out. Crowds waiting for a

Word.

Meanwhile, students had video’d the truncheons and tear gas

And police of the seventeenth, and they drove out to the

countryside,

To show the workers what was really going on:

We know you're afraid. We're afraid too--

Here is best to speak of Nataša Dudinská, for she

Was one of those crazy students. All energy and momentum, she

Went into the schools and convinced them to shut down for the

Country's good. She drove back and forth from Prague to the

Countryside, carrying newspapers wet from the printer,

making sure

They got out to the country before they could get mysteriously

Lost. For some reason, the newspapers had begun to tell the

Truth. Novel concept, words, soft as a bomb,

Changing mind by mind. Svobodné Slovo was first, then

Lidová Demokracie, then Mladá Fronta--

What changes minds? What do minds change from and

To?

From there, Nataša Dudinská raced back to

Wenceslas Square, where you

Could drop a penny and it would not hit the ground. So many!

In little more than a week, the Dudinskás of Czechoslovakia

 61

Brought down a strike that showed that the yeggs were losing

purchase.

At the Headquarters of the Union of Czechoslovak Creative

Artists,

They were painting and printing posters to throw up all over the

country--for the

Workers sent their children to Prague to be educated. The dogs

were

Tearing their children, would tear any child, as always.

Arguments

In the Prague streets; outbreaks here and there; in the

coffeeshops,

Heated coffee, heated words. The TV was blind, the

Radio mum. It had to happen in the streets. It needed a

Leader in the November cold.

People can love one another; it

Happens occasionally. On the twentieth,

Leipzig burned in the cold,

A million warm throats calling for Einheit--oh

Large word. Leipzig sang of Prague, a city

Proof that human beings can imagine themselves as gods, so

Gorgeous its avenues.

Ladislav Adamec, Prime Minister,

Agreed to meet with Civic Forum, but would not talk to

Havel. Havel got out of the car but was turned away. 11/21

You could not walk through Prague for the crowds.

 62

In the wintering Square

They set up banks of speakers, and the next day Havel spoke.

A writer, not a public speaker. But he had suffered,

He had written, and he had a point. There in the Square that

Was their soul, uncanny in a million clouds of frozen

Breath, he spoke, and the crowd spoke back, and he spoke, and

the crowd

Answered in euphoric back-and-forthness. At the Kontakt studio,

Cameramen were fighting over the cameras--sometimes you saw

Havel at the microphone; other times, a rock band. Havel won--

Míloš Jakeš (Party boss), step down; you, too,

Gustáv Husák, president of a people who do not want you.

Release the prisoners; punish the violent. No one

Slept in Prague those nights.

No one stopped praying.

(What do you think they were doing

in churches all these years?

What were we, children of the world, praying for?)

Churches were packed. The squares were packed. They started

saying

Havel na Hrany!--Havel to the Castle. Make him president.

From Wenceslas Square down Národní Avenue, Prague overflowed.

The leaders of Civic Forum learned to run everywhere,

Follow the script, hide in the Magic Lantern. At the

demonstrations, the

Crowds sang for peace, and when they were asked to go home, they
 63

took

Keys out of their pockets and shook them, thousands on

thousands,

Sparkling music of a human heaven. Leipzig had its candles;

Prague had the music of St. Vitus' Bell and the keys to its

soul. Something was about to happen: sleepless, drunk with

expectation,

Massing in a responsorial psalm, everyone thrummed like

Jets.

Nataša Dudinská was in a taxi, trapped in the 11/24

Traffic jam, throatsore. She'd been shouting the usual hours

in a meeting.

Her cabbie was talking past the speed limit. Everyone's radios

Crackled with conflicting information.

Then she and the cabbie heard:

Jakeš was stepping down.

Future, rend the present.

Dreamlike moment: weeping cabbie, embracing strangers

Staggering from their cars, with all the other drivers,

Shaking hands, weeping, on their knees and praying.

Bells and keys and rock music. Havel na Hrany!

Now the hardest work: to end it when the opponent is

Out on his feet. The Party still had its fist, the army.

Everyone knew the tanks

were just ignition away.

The government itself must go.

 64

On November 25,

In the flaying winds on Letná Plain, Havel spoke to

Three quarters of a million versions of his own soul,

Who called for pressure with shivering words, rang their keys.

Adamec said he'd come next day, to apologize for the seventeenth,

And he gasped when he saw

a million people ready to talk.

They

Turned his words into an antiphon, call and response

Turning his name to a verse and refrain, so they could join in.

He couldn't follow. He tried to lecture. That's when they knew

It really was over for him.

When he said that the Party would

rectify its

Errors, the million cried Too late! Too late!

That

Is when it ended.

Behind him stood Dubček, keyway between that

failed

Prague Spring of nineteen sixty-eight and this bitter

Winter of triumph.

Adamec finished,

was finished.

They ended with the

Lord's Prayer.

No one stopped praying.

 65

Next day, a strike:

Just for two hours, the country went still. The mines were

holes, The schools buildings. No one worked. No one stopped

praying.

Havel left the crowds, took cover in the Magic Lantern--

And on the thirtieth,

the Communist Party

gave

up.

There never was a month

like that December. Memory-

Defeator, killer, projector of images on walls. On the first day,

Gorbachev met with Pope John Paul II and

Who could believe that?

Old poet,

breakneck

Skier, man in a funny hat, inebriate of the divine, whose

Whispers found the ears of unbelief--

ask Marcos,

Ask Noriega, ask Jaruzelski, ask Gorbachev,

Ask Adamec whose shadow it was that blazed like fusion in the

Million-mind uprisings. His.

And you won't find

Those men

anywhere.

He stood throughout, and

 66

At the end, he stood. They fell to the awful might of

Peace and a much-mistaken, adamant man, who stood like

A clockmaker-god apart from the scene. A great one of this

Century, he witnessed its prayers acted out on TV,

Europe so throng-swollen it seemed about to sink.

Next, at Malta, Gorbachev 12/3

met with an invisible man named Bush.

So what?

They declared the end of a war that had never

Been fought. Bizarre ceremony--to shake hands over the corpse of

Ghost. Take credit for killing a nothing they had woven.

Goodbye, Cold War. Strange, but I do not feel like dancing.

Ciao, Bello. Specter, spell, haunting. No, I

Can't wish you Rest in Peace; there's nowhere for a nothing to

lie.

How can I mourn, when the best thing about you is that you never

happened?

I should have grown up, like most children, hungry and a little

afraid;

Instead, you were evil eye of morning, poison of the afternoon.

We sat in circles and asked each other: When will we die?

You ate up my parents' taxes, more than ten Medicares.

I can't even blame you. Your creators didn't know you were

nothing.

Prophets who cried in the anxious world and converted themselves,

 67

They took the cash. Declared you over. Bowed to the applause.

Cold or hot, you hateful Scream, you're worse than God.

To the north, 12/3

lightning in East Germany:

Down the chute,

Egon Krenz, Party leader;

down, the whole

Politburo, the whole Central Committee. That was the

Real goodbye.

Bush and Gorbachev, once again,

Came too late and smiled for the cameras, punished by life.

That evening,

in Czechoslovakia,

Václav and Olga Havel

Walked in Průhonice Park. The skies made them dizzy

After two weeks underground.

Back at the Magic Lantern,

Havel: At last, outside under the high, wide heavens,

I realized that this is for real, definitely not a dream.

Next day, 12/4

in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (still going),

Gorbachev condemned the tanks, the murders, the bruised bloom of

Prague nineteen sixty-eight.

Too late! Too late!

Cried the million on Letná Plain.

Those who come too late . . .

 68

On the sixth,

Egon Krenz

lugged his ego

out of

Government. Now all there were

were two Germanies inching together,

As the cells at the edge of a wound

layer toward the center and healing.

Next day, 12/7

Czechoslovakia

had news to stop the heart:

Adamec,

thwarted and balked,

bailed out.

(We didn't know that

Further east

at a crossroads country

the Romans had named

After themselves,

a crossroads race of

Latins and Slavs and

Magyars--in the way that people, behind their own backs,

Play fate and their own saviors--were making an unconscious

decision.)

On the tenth, Czechoslovakia again

(we were breathless

 69

Each night, as though running through the calendar, as though

the year,

Tilted, were emptying into the next. I, our daughter

Watched): Gustáv Husák appointed a noncommunist government, then

Quit.

Wholly free elections at the end of the month;

Havel na Hrany?

Could a free people

elect a playwright?

Same day:

fifty thousand people demonstrated in Bulgaria.

(People were getting good at this.) Something new in a

Country not free since the Turks smashed the Bulgars

Six centuries ago: a Union of Democratic Forces, a

Group named after nineteen eighty-nine itself. They

Said they wanted democracy. And, in the devastating, careening

Magic of this year, multiparty elections,

That is, free elections,

were promised for nineteen ninety.

Bring the camera eye

back around to Africa

To see a strange thing:

an old prisoner, an ex-boxer,

Meeting with a head of state.

South Africa, and Nelson Mandela,

He of Free Nelson Mandela, 12/14

 70

song and cry on

The lips of the world,

met with Frederick Willem de Klerk.

Now, why would they do that?

Our daughter cried. She knew

That they would let him go.

De Klerk was good at reading,

And the air and sunlight wrote him daily letters. Three

Letters he knew quite well: ANC,

African National Congress. Perhaps he had added up the

Blood plus animal hatred plus Soweto plus shock-troop legacy

In a country of anguished loveliness

and decided it couldn't go on.

Or maybe he simply read his correspondents, air and light.

Mandela seemed to blink, walking in the light and air.

Soon, de Klerk would unbanish the ANC and free him;

Soon there would be elections; soon was becoming now, and

Our daughter looked at me for a clue as how to feel.

I smiled though my bewilderment

as she danced to the crowds on TV.

Swing it, oh swing the camera

across the Atlantic, to Chile,

Shoestring down the western coast of South America

Twirled round the swollen digits of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte,

Home of Neruda, who sang this century as no one will sing it.

Once upon a time, 1973

 71

thanks to the CIA, a fascist replaced a Marxist.

Allende fell, and

Pinochet rode his limousines, ducked the

Well-intended bullet, rigged elections, killed and

Imprisoned and promised. The nineteen-eighties, constipated

Decade, strained, and he dropped.

A plebiscite cried No more

Past nineteen ninety. In the land of Macchu Picchu, riots and

Murders. The rainshadow of the world darkened his reign at last.

Shifting his thrombotic thighs, he called the great election,

And on December 14,

two weeks left in the year,

Patricio Aylwin was elected President of Chile, and Pinochet

Waddled back to his ranch.

On four of the seven continents

Human beings were acting in congress, changing their worlds

Except where there were penguins or kangaroos or

Yankees.

Beloved Brazil--

delta of races, America itself--

I drank your language from the alluvial throat of

Milton Nacimento.

You forced even him to sing wordless songs, his albums all

Melodies, wails, ululations--

for you were everything except free,

Brazil,
 72

Until

on the seventeenth

you elected your first President in nearly

Thirty years, Fernando Collor de Mello. (To be sure,

He soon took leave, arm-in-arm with scandal.

Welcome to democracy, Brazil, to the pit of party politics.)

Why do you hate yourself, Brazil, slash and burn yourself,

Steal your gold, fell your jungles for McDonald's burgers,

Shove your tribespeople into cities?--and yet what are you

But the World Dance? Brown river swollen with life

Slifing toward the sun? Keep flowing. I want to see where you

wind,

What torrents you join, what springs in your heat.

On that same day

A schoolbus braked before a church in Timişoara,

Romania,

and

Machinegunned the crowd on the steps. Elderly, infant,

they folded,

Flowers in the blood. Exit schoolbus, guns flaming.

Fate was written: Nicolae Ceauşescu had eight days left.

Easy enough to say

Ceauşescu was a tyrant--

But the evil in him was no more than the evil in myself.

Let's have the courage. Gaze in the bulged mirror. Say it:

If I had been Ceauşescu I would have done what he did:

 73

Serve the time when young; prove my loyalty and correctness;

Believe my Marx, fight to rise, kill for the good of

Romania--and here is my sickness--somewhere in that brutal

scramble,

Lose track of distinctions: between Romania's good

And what I wanted; between the fond dreams of Marx and

My dreams for myself; between telling my people my dreams

And whipping them toward a hallucination.

In time, see myself

As victor, father, savior. Assemble a soulless army of

Hirelings and housecarls, famish them for power, give them a

Roman

Name: Securitate. See Romania as my children, and

Whenever a child rebelled, do as fathers have always

Done through time: kill it and muzzle the rest.

Romania, clove of garlic to flatten beneath the knife, to

Scrape off the cutting board. Dilute the flavor: scoop out the

Ancient heart of Bucharest . . . the bazaars, the winding

streets, The neighborhoods, all that spoke of any other time,

Of the rich and generous coincidences

that made Romania Romania . . .

Pitch up a faceless city of supremacy, stone, and ugliness

(Elena's face . . . my wife, official goddess . . . for her. . .

Some of my half-built palaces still stand, wind in the girders,

Vows eviscerated). Sacrifice everything to the infected dream.

Export women's gymnastics, the scabbed and calloused girls

 74

Unconcerned with gravity (they saw their parents

every two years),

Their flourish, balance, and muscle suggesting womanhood they

lacked,

As though four decades of choking on dirt of promises

Were dispelled by the girlish genius of Nadia Comaneci;

Mortgage the future of twenty-three million people to pay off

Romania's debts, for the sake of a press conference/praise

conference;

The relocations, instant cities, evening blackouts,

My children not quite frozen, not quite starved to death,

Coal, contracts, Bărăgan Plains, everything sold off,

Five-year plans, ten-year plans, failures on schedule,

Stealing half of Romania to create industrial metastases,

Dream so consuming I'd forgotten what it was,

One-bulb houses, stunted polis, architectures of myself

Until all of Romania was an orphanage of iron cribs,

Crenellated labyrinth of corridors leading to the heart of

deprivation,

An eyeless, acephalic mouth on a stem, screaming.

I would have done what he did.

And when the momentum came near,

A year, nineteen eighty-nine, happening in Romania

Because it had happened everywhere else,

I'd be the father who

Sees he's through--and I would rise to my true depravity,

 75

Kill and distract with a new precision, an old amnesia,

Kidnap demonstrators, disappear their lives in the world.

Nineteen eighty-nine had been a harangue in Romania, a

Vendetta against Hungarian, hunting a language, a culture.

Nationalism: last resort of dictators in danger.

(You Magyar monks

who slugged us into diligence, tamped Latin

Into our brains--once we'd stumbled through Cicero and Vergil,

You grinned: So? Smart boys, isn't it? Try our impossible

Language. Next to her, Latin is mama-dada.

Magyar: orphan wandering the mouth, words like centipedes

Endlessly segmented. We recognized nothing, except that it was

poetry.)

Fate: a clergyman, Laszlo Toekes, ethnic Hungarian

Who obsessed a demagogue tugging the rope toward the past.

It was not the size of his congregation at the Timi_oara

Reformed Church, but the text of his sermons,

strings of sentences

That split and recombined, genetic code of conviction, human

rights and

God and change, read off at the ribosome of the changing mind,

That lost Ceauşescu his humanity.

Dammed off from sense like

Most tyrants, he gave the order to evict the priest, then

Flew to Iran while his country convulsed. (Fool, he returned.)

Hate
 76

is a kind of death,

a terrible forgetting of ourselves,

A blindness that falls, unlearning of language, jungle reversion,

Stroke, disconnect past understanding, a numbing by lightning.

Not even China, with its endless mountains and history and army,

was

As savage as Timişoara.

Ceauşescu knew what was coming.

He'd shouted it down all year, yet here, thousands of bodies with

Spirits sensing this is it were poised to throw themselves

Between priest and bullets.

I would have said what he said:

If that is what they want

I have bullets enough.

In a cold corner of December far from the gaze of the world,

A special cowardice of machine guns and helicopters

Struck the townspeople. 12/17

It would be the last time this year

A tyrant fired at their hearts.

Thousands were willing to die.

Into the streets unarmed they went, made heroes by anger.

Transfigured, they raised their hands together,

ordinary people

Whose hopes reach only as far as their checks, who cleave to

habit

As to a goddess.
 77

Their children taught them. They fell first,

Crying, My mother, my father, don't mind. In terror/grief/joy,

Fathers and mothers ran into the fire, worse than they knew.

Cut down, so many saw that they had lost their worlds.

I hope that some remembered that they had turned the battle,

And that, as unremembrance fell, some died glad.

I lost them all, lost them forever, lose them now

And for good. Wherever they are, they are not with me

in the flesh

I care for. No angel's whispers behind the stair of my

Soul comfort me. I want their light, the

Pebbled velvet of their skin, the shimmer of their patter, the

weight

Of them in touch, smell, taste, touch, their private

Secret selves only I ever knew.

My sleepless weeks writhe with the instant of their pain. In the

crevasse

Of two, three, of four, of gravel-eyed five, when I know

The loss of them, I know it was even worse for them.

Each of us

is here only

by the unlikeliest

string of

Survivals through millennia, one determined nomad,

One lucky trekker shambling across moon-frozen

Plains after another, hundreds of motherings furtive in the

 78

Darkest corners one step ahead of the coal-black

Cougar padding vacant-eyed, all stealth, calculus, claw.

Error and accident burst forth in us into miracle,

And I threw the clay of miracle in each of those I lost.

As I go from the graves empty-handed, bombardments pound like

hearts.

Say we are only animals

a few base pairs from madness--

But what beast kills so knowingly, gazing in the victim's eyes,

Its own eyes?

Perhaps the Timişoara refugees

Lied, leveraged the numbers. Perhaps, ingenious in outrage,

They dug up all the boneyards and faked the mass graves--

The moldering dead,

whose faces caved,

who gestured to nothing,

Who lay exposed and wrenched past decency, piled in hundreds

In the city streets . . . we sinned to look at them, we,

Humiliated before our future selves.

Perhaps the photos were

All a trick to shock the world.

Let me then

Praise

such grisly genius,

enlisting the dead in revolt.

Timişoara swelled with a wave of police, ebbed with a

 79

Wave of protest.

Doors flew open . . . thefts of life . . .

Families crawled through the icy woods, looking for graves.

Blackshirts crouched on church steeples and picked off passersby.

Back came the crowds, the rockfests, the

Molotov cocktail parties, the

Cans of nails in dynamite. Suicidal with loyalty, the people

Would not stop the police would not stop to the last.

According to all reports, no one stopped praying.

Breakneck jerk

from cold to warmth,

Romania to Panama:

Pockfaced clown of evil, Manuel Noriega,

Last-class pal of power, broker of kickbacks,

Potbelly with epaulets, old-fashioned small-change dictator,

Had started to embarrass his friends.

Not his fault America

Sniffed billions up its nose.

Manuel, capitalist candyman,

Fly laying eggs in ordure, merely skimmed the profits.

Busy year, Manuel: building up your pile,

Surviving coups, slitting and mugging your opposition,

Slapping down elections, farting at world threats.

Like a weasel with a cow in utero,

Panama was somewhat uneasy,

A U.S. base in its midst. All year long each side

 80

Had swapped arrests, charges, hostages. Six months of whining

At Manuel had hauled no wood, and now the United States was

Punching him on the arm, waiting for the wrong move.

Noriega obliged.

Robert Paz, a marine,

Was killed, his family saddened. 12/19

Operation Echo.

Languid invasion: as the American Army, awe itself, fanned out,

Shoppers dickered over Christmas gifts at stall and bodega.

Automatic gunbursts flickered aquí y allá in Panama City

While ghosts with guns flicked behind the trees down the

streets while

Business meetings went on dinner parties TVs. 12/20

American TV was best. There you could see anchormen in

Fatigues for some reason; electronic maps throbbing; experts

Working their expert jaws before backdrops without a soldier.

Gunfire and death there were--a dictator's Keystone Cops

Versus a giant's fingernail.

It would take a few days; a city

Outjungles the jungle. Not so much fighting as chasing--but this

Was the first of two easy wars (Saddam Hussein,

Genius of evasion, gnat in the eye, saint of the blockheaded,

Was next: Baghdad green in infrared flames, 1990

A pearl necklace of bombardment descending, smart bombs on

videotape,

The Revolutionary Guard, starvation their sergeant, fright

 81

their general,

Knelt to their saviors, a few confused Italian journalists--

And thousands of Iraqis gone from the earth, from those who

wanted them)

That killed real people.

Manuel, unreal person,

Your friend George has sent you a 24,000-soldier

Love note. Save your head, worth millions. Under cover of

A looter's holiday in streets where Christ will soon be born,

Dodge for real. Where, oh where is a clown to hide?

Simultaneity--

our daughter and I

dizzy with news,

Blued by the screen--

in Berlin 12/18-20

confederacy, Germany to

Germany.

Ceauşescu flew a deluded plane back to Romania--the

Future is a permanent virus we cannot choose but catch; it

Spreads by mouth, by touch, feeds on the riches of the serum,

Defies osmosis across the blood-brain barrier.

Ceauşescu

Airborne, the virus spread from Timişoara to Bucharest.

Who caught it? Who else? Students.

This was a year of students, of

Churchgoers, of the faceless and desperate, of anyone prone to

 82

belief.

Who do people decide in masses to risk it all?

Because they are forced to the stake.

Nothing left. Time has

Chosen. It is a good day to die. Or because

they see the

Chaos before the goal, the

keeper overrun.

As elsewhere,

the students started it.

Ceauşescu touched down

Tilted. His tires bumped earth in yelps of blue smoke.

In Bucharest, the

Students rioted. Klieg lights, riflefire, helicopters,

Sirens, tanks.

A city falling apart, the walls of

Custom down, and the teeth at the throat: Securitate in

Full gorge.

It doesn't make any sense, but I

Would have done what Ceauşescu did: call a rally to 12/21

Celebrate myself. (It had always worked before.)

When I took the dais

the mantle of habit lowered

And hundreds of thousands quieted. The month before, I'd stolen

The usual elections, and now I spoke of order,

Of what I had accomplished, of me, myself, Romania,

 83

And at first it worked. Elena, a badlands at dusk behind me,

Nodded at my large words, applauded the usual lines.

Shills by the thousands clapped and hurrahed to geld the crowd,

So at first it worked. We settled into the rhythm of old,

Father to ciphers.

Then my

midsentence

face

changed.

That was my death though I did not know it.

Out of the thousands, a

Voice

a distant other

another other, distant,

Were pulling apart my fingers, my words.

Behind me, agents

Took down names, sent off spies, thrashers, snipers--

Voice joined voice

distance shrank

I shouted louder

Voice and voice

fear shrinking

I shrank louder

Voice after voice

distance gone

I melting--
 84

Now a voice with five hundred thousand throats, as though I

would Listen--that was when my face changed, in terminal

surprise at my

Sudden death--Elena, gone already, indignant at

Being gone.

And so I began to hector, lecture,

Pester, wagging finger, just a former dictator

Exposed, an elderly scold.

I fled the podium, the

Palace.

As I tried to disappear, the city was a shout

Behind me, an exorcism on pillars of fire and smoke.

People and police brawled in the longest night of the year.

. . . A woman and man ran 1980

across Golden Gate

Into the night, the night accepting them. She accepted

Him, her portals enclosing, rendering him a spline between

Present and future.

Even the pluripotent cell has gates.

Shuttle the iron, calcium, potassium ions through, that the

Tiny atomic factories may roar and life persist. My

Ears

are gates that open

people to me, me to

Them, their precious voices. Precious gates, mine

Are closing.
 85

Gates for Beethoven, traffic, the voice of the

Woman who ran with me, such acceptance, one end to the

Other. We flowed next to two ribbons, ruby and opal

Streaming over the Golden Gate, shuttle of lives.

My nostrils are gates to my memory. Orrisroot. Sandalwood.

Charlie. Where I was, the moment when. Memory smooths the

Rough blanket of fact, edits out the periphery,

Frames it--but through my nostrils, diesel, and I keen at a

Cruel goodbye years ago.

Fingerpaints:

Gates to an ancient kindergarten. Iodine: a vivid kiss

(Agnes Mioducki once when she asked and once when she didn't;

We were five, in a dusky hall in November; she proposed; 1958

Okay, I said, and we went out to play, opening a gate from

Dusk to evening).

Eden had gates, we're told, of our

Design. When Enkidu touched the gate to Humbaba's wood, his

Hand shriveled and death began.

Precious passage, that

Life persist.

The good is to go gates open, to open

Gates for another, to show what gates may open.

Let us go gates open, borders down, willing to learn languages.

Open, we still are different, delightful for being open.

I write that on this day 12/22

the Brandenburg Gates were opened.

 86

They mobbed Mark-Engels Platz, billowed by the milling thousands

down

Unter den Linden, undone of lindens in the last World War,

Lively again in free conjunctions of living Berliners. They

Redeemed two cities into one Berlin, and

The colonnades, the pavilions, the Quadriga of Victory,

Neoclassic triumphs,

Watchers over history, over eighteen forty-eight (sister year),

over a

Kaiser's folly

turned brows of fascist architecture

scarred by the

Russian breaking of Hitler,

turned archways of passage denied,

Repaired in the Cold War

to speak of total power--

Now, now, for the first time, they let them be Gates,

To open, to let forth, invite to mingle, to issue, to

Pass.

Let the exultant exult; they deserved it, for

What they'd done and the healing still to come: the nausea of

Naziism, still churning, and two generations who

Spied on one another to feed the octopus Terror.

(Even the Polish black marketers, those harbingers, partied in

their booths,

Glad that markets were opened, leery of coming competition.)

 87

What history says was spoken in the open stone of the Gates:

How gates open, to go gates open.

When the succubus of dreams

tortures us, and we find we

cannot awaken,

We blame the eyes we open,

whose vision cannot ransom us.

In the waning days of the year, cold and dark lowering,

Two dictators a hemisphere apart

ran from revolutions,

Hid in cities, put on disguises, evaded, reduced to

Men unable to wake from what they had created.

One we can laugh at: Noriega, cringing his way through

Panama City, every streetcorner bristling with U.S.

Soldiers looking for something to do. Even the snipers were

Getting bored.

But Elena and Nicolae Ceauşescu . . . there is no

Laughter. Applications for immortality rejected,

Their monumental metropolises half-built,

Romania all but sacked, they fled the stomachs, purses,

Imaginations denied.

Who chased them? Opportunists,

Tricksters with timing, cool killers sick of waiting,

Ready to take.

Who ran with the dictator? Those already

Dead.
 88

In Bucharest, Securitate battled the army,

Now on the people's side (there survival lay).

In the television building, a provisional government of students

and ex-communists

Ran command central, shouted orders all over.

They captured a general. Very pleasant. He agreed to their terms.

They wanted to show him they were different, let him use the

Phone.

He said he was negotiating,

and they

Believed him--as he called in coordinates to the enemy

Gunners. Bombs and bullets smashed the windows, very

Accurate.

They tore the phone out,

tied him up. Below,

Army and police and people battled street by street,

Killing and dying in the killing

cold. Ceauşescu

ran.

No hill would cover him, no tree shade. He and Elena

Touched hands that couldn't believe. 12/22-24

The world learned a

New name:

Ion Iliescu.

There seemed to

Be some question--
 89

savior? time-server? raptor?

Well, his people were chasing the bad guys,

therefore hero

He.

Ceauşescu changed car after car

and saw all roads bricked

Off . . . twisted sycamores, uncomfortable valleys . . .

How could they not have known,

pursuer and pursued

to chase was to

Catch,

to catch to kill?--

but he wasn't running from them;

He was running from Leipzig,

whose candles were raised against him;

Berlin,

whose Gates opened against him;

Prague, whose keys and

Bells tintinnabulated against him;

Beijing, whose

Goddess was blind against him; and

television, the bodies in

dying

Color, suppurating hospitals, families in rifles, the

News NO ONE IS IN CHARGE, his

Face, Elena's, on the mass-media mural, frescoed in

 90

Nets of quivering electrons--5,000 dead in Bucharest--

Coffin truckloads rattling--truth and lies conspiring

Against him. They

caught him in Tîrgovişte, an

inch on the map from

Bucharest

and

they didn't know what to do with him.

Conflicting reports

Harried the airwaves; they heard the radio, saw the TV:

University Square a killing field; Securitate

Fighting to win

then survive

then kill

then hurt

Transition

all was thrown up

NO ONE, NO ONE IN CHARGE

Cities awash in fire, aflame in blood, the temples

Riven

all of them, captors, captured,

cast into the real

World

no, the real one

where law is a holiday and

everything
 91

Happens. The old man, the old woman shouted

In voices they knew. Release us. Now, felons.

Dead already, all of you.

Only an old man,

Very persuasive.

They had to do something

bound and blinded them

Threw them in an armored car and began to

drive over the

Countryside, around and around in loops of panic, taking

Directions from rebel helicopters

reporting death everywhere,

Driver and shotgun screaming at each other

dictators screaming

Radio news of professors, generals, old enemies of the regime

Bumbling toward a government

driving, driving in circles, for

Three days, hornblende-black, news of commando raids,

Free Romanian Television taken, lost, retaken,

Blind dictator screaming like

wheels, dirt, gravel,

Driver, shotgun, codes, choppers, driving, driving in a

Released world

all walls down.

When the blindfolds lifted

They saw a farmhouse in 12/25

 92

odor of pigshit

a Gods-knows-where. They

Ached from the truck, were taken to a bare room, wooden

Planks groaning. Sat in chairs. Ceauşescu knew

All of the drones around him. Now he commanded them

Just as always: Release us in the name of our sacred law.

Contempt and impatience jigged his eyes. It was not him who

Was afraid. He shouted orders. They looked at one another, then

A mole spoke: Extraordinary military court.

Ceauşescu scoffed. He was right. These were smaller men.

Mole read off some questions pencilled on a lunch bag:

Do you or do you not?

Genocide?

Sixty thousand?

Destruction of the economy? Assassin of our spirit?

Fleeing the country?

embezzle our patrimony?

overseas accounts?

Elena snorted: These are your charges? Petty, dreary

Mockery. Genius of the harangue, he rejected, demanded,

Completely right

this was no law

he had them pinned

And never knew he was going to die until a

Man appeared at a back door, carrying that engine of death, a

Video camera.
 93

Mole repeated the questions.

Now rose

Old man's voice, indignant at the red

Eye of the camera

as if, in a year of taped rebellion

They'd best make sure

they got this down

to show the world, to

Make it real. An actuality, legitimate

Murder.

Disgrace. Travesty. No authority. Refuse to

Answer--the grandeur of his delusion

forbade their pity, for

He, like Marcos, Hussein, Noriega, was immured; he was

Defiance apart. The weed fear had not split that wall.

. . . Finds you guilty of every charge . . . sentences you . . .

He shouted Idiots, rose above them in the naked room where

The walls cried Idiots.

The red eye shone.

The court hesitated,

Got them up; red

shone the eye; they

trooped outside,

Boots resounding on walls and floor. Refuse to acknowledge

Clowns

Charlatans
 94

Nothing but murderers

this was Elena, who

First saw the rifles and laughed with rage, she and her husband

Braving them in the law.

It might have been Mole:

Merry Christmas

Out went the eye.

Across a field,

crows flashed from a maple . . .

On went the eye

recording silence, smoke, fog,

Man, woman, garden.

They rushed the tape back to Bucharest, to

Free Romanian Television

and a sigh was released in Romania.

From that moment the gunfire drained away. No one was

Sure what was happening. Some cried Charade! The old

bosses had

Simply changed sides. Why give them power

Just because they'd killed? At century's end, an ancient

Mode of succession.

Divorced from bestiality, Romania drew

Aside the blanket and welcomed its new spouse, uncertainty--

While a clown and former general

scurried to the Vatican Embassy

In Panama City and begged for asylum.

 95

Which thing first? our

Daughter asked. Bloody, funny, stunning Christmas,

Ceauşescu gone, Noriega hanging on the Vatican's flagging nipple

(The U.S. Army blasted maddening rock and roll

Into the compound to flush him--

Oh God

The Archies

I surrender),

and

Alexander Dubček elected president of the Czechoslovak 12/28

Federal parliament.

Our daughter was four, our son one.

Pine was fresh in the room. I know the world does not

Believe,

but if our daughter is right, this was the year

Flowers vanquished the tanks, when nineteen sixty-eight

Switched digits, flipped one over.

In the afternoon,

Exhausted by gifts, our children slept

nor did they dream

What I dreamed at four.

We, my wife said, give them this quiet.

On Christmas night TV the crowds hailed Dubček,

Blew kisses to Noriega

sleepless in the Vatican Embassy

(We hate him We hate him We hate him),

 96

fought and planned in Bucharest,

All of us

soluble fish André Breton

streamlining as we swim.

Four days later, in

Czechoslovakia, they

elected president the

Scriptwriter for the Velvet Revolution.

Havel na Hrany -- 12/29

He scuffed at the mike, spoke his first political words.

On that same day, they made

typewriters legal in Romania, and

Marin, Ceauşescu's brother, hanged himself in Vienna. As

Nineteen eighty-nine ended,

Poland changed its name and

Braced for capitalism, Romania called off the vigilantes and

Announced April elections, the Pope served midnight Mass,

The women of the Elections Gazette looked for western

investors, and

Noriega, flayed by the Eagles, cowered in the Vatican Embassy.

On a rooftop in a New York forest, we looked through a glass,

Toasted the courageous millions in

champagne and freezing stars.

Now it fell to the peoples to thrash a way into a future

In the clamber of parties, mouse courage of legislatures,

 97

Purpose lost sight of in the drizzle of interest--

Russia bawls, writhes, stuck in the birthing passage--

Czechoslovakia splits. Havel in, then out, then

In again. Wałęsa loses the Presidency.

Here and there, the old thieves feed on the people's

Impatience.

How to juggle Getting, efficient and inhumane, with

Caring, humane and inefficient?

Good luck.

What voice answers prayer is fearfully

complex, fearfully

Human.

Flesh of the map fists and divides, four, eight,

Sixteen, thirty-two, Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus, Macedonia,

Letters snaking across mountains and borders. Prayer

Finds answers in the grit of process, or should I say

No answers, but a gesture, open-handed, forward . . .

I look back on this year and think our daughter was right:

This was the year the prayers were

answered, great tasks done,

Greater awaiting. This was the year we knelt in school for.

Of course, she takes for granted that life is a

conversation, that

To pray is to make a formality of the ordinary. For

Her, everything hears, everything listens. No children kneel

In the hysterical darkness of elders, schools and schools and

 98

schools of them,

Praying claustrophobia away. Her life is a clearing;

We never stopped praying.

I think she was right.

The moment we commit ourselves, providence begins. W. H. Murray

Each house is a cosmos on a galaxy street on this speck of a

planet.

In this great dying of frogs,

that latest forward lobe,

The soul organ,

quizzes its surroundings, drawing

Story from welter. There is that in this life to bid us

Knock on our neighbors' doors, ask how it is with them,

And listen for their answers.

This year

led us to

a world to be

Deserved--if only we knew what the work of deserving was.

For the Next Century

The good swimmer knows her arms, her legs, her timing.

Swells oppose and channel belittles. Horizon: desert.

But her hauling breaths (courage) and her shoulders (patience)

work.

She knows it will be her arms alone that will raise the shore.

Could we have a swimmer's faith,

 99

to love the midst of history

As the greased stroker loves midnight lost in the aching Channel,

This ocean (time) we swim in would be granite to our step.

Let the I enlarge! Dilate for the veritable light

Of what I truly is--a slub in the linen of time,

Knot worked in a network jangling with choices, contrail

Arcing through alternatives, Saint Sebastian of cause.

Take a gay hammer to the cased icon of the self.

Let this new I, no longer lost, though often left,

Be white and iris, setting and diamond, blazing nerve to the

Fever switchboard brain. Refuse all readymade lenses for a

World that deserves to be seen and seen in. Let down roots/

Arteries/nerves to soak the earth in blood and mad epinephrine

(Frida's painting). Bind us by the gut-strings

to our enworldment.

Already for generations now, all these immense centuries it has

been

Happening--the sacred infection of the pristine being, delicious

Mixture of bloods against law, hectic hemorrhage across borders,

the

Coming of the brick-grey almond-eyed genius-race,

What humankind, who knows why?, has always feared.

Let all pronouns marry. Worship the known and unknown who

Sank in us their seed. Work to deserve the past of

Lies and heroes' blood, to earn a world you will not

Ever see. Rejoice at the future, that canyon to be filled

 100

With work and suffering. This dance--the heart fails, Walter Benjamin

The heart races to be at the dance--this anthem of what is

Not here yet, in the death of families and sunrises

against the odds,

These are what we, against ourselves, have ever sung and danced:

Let the I enlarge. Let the I enlarge.

1962

No one stop praying.

In October nineteen sixty-two,

Missile sites in the paper, teachers let us out early.

Quiet and wonder suspended crowds of parents and children.

I walked home to an empty house where the paper said

What the radio said and the radio said what the television said:

Satellites saw the missiles, satellites told the scientists,

Scientists built the missiles, soldiers and satellites aimed them

At cities of mothers and fathers, at the hard,

combustive sleep of

Children, heroic as the slumber of trees, at murderers and

priests, at

Me, ground zero.

The modern world was true

And I saw it on page 1-A of the Santa Ana Register.

To the floor I went, saying it, a century's choir of suppliants

Drowning my words in an ocean of whispers as the huddled men

beetled
 101

In eye-socket war rooms, as a steel egg of battleships awaited

A glans of destroyers, as gamblers gambled against gambling,

the game of

Deathlike sangfroid torching a paper world. And Khrushchev

Blinked.

Years have tranced past. Was it my prayer

Or the power of prayer from four billion throats,

The unimaginable will of all the world's people--

They must not do this--that forced

Khrushchev's bothered eye, Kennedy's fricative bed,

Oswald's rifle, Johnson's nightmare, King's dream,

Mao's iron flowers, Nixon's damp handshake,

The waste of generations, South Africa, Philippines, Cambodia,

Sri Lanka, Chile, Russia, Hungary, Palestine,

Ireland? O nightmare tumult of answers, prayer avalanche,

O torn peace.

There, then, I prayed

Against world's end. When I was done, the house

Dark with misered October light, I, nine,

Wandered outside, and, wandering, found

our cul-de-sac, that teardrop

Swarming with children in the center. They'd gathered, who knows

why?,

Left records, homework, living rooms. We twined like a strand

Of living stuff in the belly of a cell. We were strangely

Dignified, courteous, as though about to take the first

 102

Handful of earth and let it slip into our world's

Grave. We scanned face after face after face for the headlines.

As

No children's should, our hearts let in the end

Of all we knew. We were all children

Everywhere that night, savanna, taiga, clutched in cities,

Singing to flocks on mountainsides, picking pockets in slums,

Staring from mother's back, led by an elder hand

Hour after aching, reaching hour. We fought and

Ignored one another daily, but on that night of the missile's

shadow,

We were as still and soft as moss. And all around us,

On every porch, standing on every step, as in any

Place that night in the whole world, a mother and a father

Came forth and gazed, a supple ring as round and wide

As a world of mothers and fathers, encircling our ring of

children

Who gazed at them gazing at us.

No one stop praying.