CLOUD OF WITNESSES

ESSAYS, POEMS, COLLAGES

CLOUD OF WITNESSES

ESSAYS, POEMS, COLLAGES

LINDA NORTON

BLAZEVOX[BOOKS]
Buffalo, New York
Cloud of Witnesses
by Linda Norton
Copyright © 2024

Published by BlazeVOX [books]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without

the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

Interior design and typesetting by Geo rey Gatza

Cover Art: Linda Norton, from “Dark White,” 2014.
collection of Alice Lyons, Sligo, Ireland.
First Edition
ff
ISBN: 978-1-60964-464-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023952509

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 Contents

I .................................................................................................................................. 11
Cloud of Witnesses: A Poetics of Social Solitude ................................................... 15
II ................................................................................................................................. 35
5.22.2020 [Sonnet] ................................................................................................. 37
5.22.2020 [Adult Children of] ................................................................................ 39
5.26.2020 ["Does This Thing Work?"] .................................................................. 41
5.27.2020 ["You think a while"] ............................................................................. 43
6.8.2020 [Bracken by the tracks:] ........................................................................... 45
6.9.2020 ["Because I felt sad"] ................................................................................ 47
6.10.2020 ["She kisses her killed boy"] ................................................................... 49
6.14.2020 ["A deeper indigo"] ................................................................................ 51
6.15.2020 ["Holy Wells and Psychic Depths"] ....................................................... 53
6.16.2020 ["La"] ..................................................................................................... 55
6.20.2020 ["You wet, Little Miss, you wet"] .......................................................... 57
7.3.2020 ["Decreole"] ............................................................................................. 59
7.12.2020 [Voteen] ................................................................................................. 61
7.15.2020 ["Opalescent"] ........................................................................................ 63
7.21.2020 ["So much for the hearse"] ..................................................................... 65
7.22.2020 [Mariolatry] ........................................................................................... 67
7.27.2020 [Church of the Immaculate Conception]............................................... 69
7.27.2020 ["Taking a pill every day for depression is depressing"] ......................... 71
7.30.2020 [While listening to Barack Obama's eulogy for John Lewis] ................. 73
8.12.2020 [Happy Ignorance] ................................................................................. 75
8.29.2020 [Inside a Thigh] ..................................................................................... 77
9.9.2020 ["Now you will bear and forebear"] .......................................................... 79
 9.12.2020 [Ash Blonde] ......................................................................................... 81
8.2.2021 [Margaret] ............................................................................................... 83
8.22.2021 [Drunk History]..................................................................................... 85
8.26.2021 ["Once an Empire"] ............................................................................... 87
III ............................................................................................................................... 89
Acknowledgments & Notes .................................................................................. 100
The cloud of witnesses, as old Saint Paul said.

James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro

CLOUD OF WITNESSES
5.15.2020 ["Enter the day"]

How to be a genuine fake:

What I have been thinking about,
because I can,
is bewilderment as a way of entering the day
as much as the work. Joyful despair
is not a reason to live, it's
a reason not to kill yourself.
Some remember ("Pretty well")
the Korean war; could I –
then – shut the door?

There she is, crossing State Street

hand-in-hand with herself,
giving way to fullest extent
of interpretation and reception.

Back on my cushion,
some insights arose.
Every few steps,
an edge again.
There is my grandfather
leaving the garden;
this city is
a kind of ocean.

13
 Attributions: Alan Watts, The Book: On the
Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are; Fanny
Howe, Night Philosophy; Marguerite Duras,
Me & Other Writing; John Berryman, The
Dream Songs; Richard Sewall, The Life of
Emily Dickinson; John Norton, Re: A
Marriage; Colleen Lookingbill, A Forgetting
Of; Susan Moon, Not Turning Away;
Nicholas Whittington, Indefinite Sessions;
Caroline Goodwin, The Paper Tree; Yolanda
Wisher, Monk Eats an Afro.

14
 Cloud of Witnesses: A Poetics of Social Solitude

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses,

let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles,
and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.
Hebrews 12:1

The poet is one pastor of this distribution between two visions

John Wieners

Alice ordered me to be made.

Alice Notley

My friend Naomi and her daughters had just returned from a trip to China
that didn’t go as planned. My son Roland had been there, too, on the way home from
adventures in Thailand and Burma. I had dinner with all of them that week, at the

15
end of February, 2020. They told me how China was shutting down because of a
virus. They’d been checked for fever at the airport in Beijing, and felt lucky to get out
when they did. When I got sick a week after seeing them (we didn’t know about
asymptomatic transmission then), I quarantined. This was a few weeks before
lockdown started in San Francisco and surrounding counties, so I was bleakly ahead of
the curve.

I knew a lot about loneliness. Sometimes, in California, from 1998 to 2020, I'd
been so lonely, and so ashamed of it, that I wanted to chew my arm off. I had no
mother, father, brothers, sisters, or spouse. When my kids were away, I had no family
at all. Alone at a bar, I’d often wonder how it had come to this. I knew my own story
and now I was reckoning with it. I’d never set out to be as independent as a heroine in
a movie or book, but that’s how it had turned out. Was this my fate or was it my
destiny? I never imagined that the lyrics of Duke Ellington’s "Sophisticated Lady"
would ever apply to me.

With disillusion deep in your eyes

You learned that fools in love soon grow wise
The years have changed you, somehow.*

I didn’t smoke or wear strapless gowns to supper clubs; but the years had changed me,
and I, too, had grown wise.

My solace during some hard years as a single mother and then an empty-nester
was my life in public places—I mean, going out into the streets or to the downtown
Oakland YMCA, a kind of third place for me—an Afrocentric church with many
ministers but no pastor or priest. Anything could happen there, or on the way to and
fro. There were poems in the faces of strangers; there were stories everywhere.

A typical day of urban gleaning before the pandemic: I ride my bike along the
lake to the Y. Whizzing by the playground, I hear a man say to a boy, “Did you kiss
it?” (Kiss what?) A young man compliments my shoes as I pass; I smile, remembering
how I used to scowl at such remarks when I was young and scared. I ring my bell to
get the geese out of my way on the path. At the Y, in the lobby, my friend Honey
shows me her new earrings and, reaching toward my cleavage, examines the pendant
of my necklace. Inside the gym, an OG on an exercise bike (I’m always amazed at how
slowly he pedals, and for a whole hour) looks me up and down and tells me that men
used to go to war for women like me. We both laugh because I’m kind of old and he’s
older. On the bench at her locker, Maggie asks me to help her to get her shoe on.

16
She’s still beautiful and I tell her so. I’m wearing a bracelet I know she likes. It’s a
cheap thing made of cream-colored resin, but it reminds her of an admirer at the
engineering firm where she worked in her forties. He traveled to Africa on business,
and once he brought her a beautiful bracelet made of real ivory. She’s been sick lately
but is still stunning at 80. I nod as she talks, but she sees I’m kind of down and she
asks me what’s going on. “Nothing much,” I say. “You know.” She does know. She’s
seen and done it all.

On the way home, in the park at dusk, cycling slowly and thinking about her, I
hear a beat. It’s a man in pajamas playing bongos behind a tree.

•••
My days and my nights in Oakland for the two decades prior to 2020 were
spent thus: paying attention, looking and listening; being acknowledged, admired,
confused, insulted, ignored, informed, distracted, corrected, enlightened, tolerated,
entertained, and/or loved. Such urban engagements–bodhisattva encounters–are a
throughline in both of my books. From Wite Out: Love and Work, published in April
of 2020 during the first months of Covid pandemic:

The life in the street here — the daily daily — “Her whole body panging and
pinging,” writes Zora Neale Hurston. "A hippy undulation below the waist
that is a sheaf of promises tied with unconscious power. She is acting out ‘I’m a
darned sweet woman and you know it.’”

I had learned, in New York and Oakland, to be a woman in public, and to

write about it in private. The streets and parks and trains and locker rooms and bars
and libraries were where I did my fieldwork. Like the poet Charles Reznikoff, “I
walked away many years.” Unlike him, as a woman, I had been both object and
subject. But as I aged, sometimes I felt I was invisible. The kind of people (not just
men) who would have smiled back at me now looked right through me. As a kind of
thick ghost, I had a new and different experience in the street. It was the kind of
invisibility I craved as a young woman, when it was hard to escape notice in public.
Now I mourned whatever it was that was gone and going.

•••
When I was young, walking in Boston or New Haven or Brooklyn, I was
always on the lookout for epiphanies (my obsession with Joyce's Dubliners set me on
this path). I saw people and things that everyone else saw, but they didn’t seem to
notice. Sometimes the streets delivered little lessons, and for me that was kismet, like

17
when the radio plays a song that corresponds to your feelings when you turn the dial in
the car. But in middle age, I became less interested in startling insights, and more
interested in economics, culture, character and time; musical time, quantum time, and
historical time. Like Bob Kaufman, I was “hoping the beat is really the truth.”

So I collaged my days, my life, and my writing and reading, literally and

metaphorically cutting and pasting, juxtaposing thoughts and words and images. After
years of marriage, and even more years of single motherhood and struggle and
pleasure, I had chosen independence over all the available options; I didn't really want
to "belong" to anyone except my children. But I did want to be with everyone,
including other people's children and mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and
rejects and widows and orphans and angels. And I was.

•••
As the pandemic hit, I was finishing my term as columnist-in-residence for the
San Francisco Museum of Art's Open Space. Because of the pandemic, my April 2020
column, it turned out, was a valediction for a way of life that was essential to my
writing practice. Without the life and energy of strangers and their stories, what would

18
I have to write about? I wrote an introduction to my last column for Open Space, which
featured excerpts from Wite Out:

April 7, 2020

Quarantina

And now I’m with you, instantly

& I’ll see you tomorrow night, and I see you constantly, hopefully
though one or the other of us is often, to the body-mind’s own self
more or less out of sight!
Ted Berrigan, from "So Going Around Cities"

At the beginning of March I went out to dinner with my daughter for

what would be my last meal in a restaurant for who knows how long. We
stopped into the parking garage in Jack London Square, where my friend Ivory
was working in the booth at the exit. When she saw me, she came out of the
booth and gave me a bear hug. Impulsively, I hugged her back, though I had
stopped touching people because I was afraid of contagion.

Ivory is a friend from the Oakland YMCA, my congregation and

dharma and sangha for decades. My second book includes many scenes set
there. Now I miss that life, and I miss my friends in New York and Ireland,
and, closer to home, the women, and the young father with a baby on his lap,
at the nail shop down the block.

That encounter with Ivory was the last time I touched, or was touched by, anyone but
my children for more than a year.

I was on the hinge of aging in public when the pandemic hit. And suddenly I
was old in private. In my late fifties, I wrote something about that hinge in response to
one of writer John Keene's emotional outreach exercises. Here is John’s prompt:

One day over the next half-year, imagine that your life is a "work of art," and
behave as if it is all day long. At the very end of the day, write about a
paragraph
about the experience.

19
 Song of Myself

Filmmaker, star, anthropologist, ghost—me on a walk. On the pavement, I

notice an electric-blue Post-It from that batch I stole when I quit my job:
"taylor * negritude * milk * and you" – It’s my dirty to-do list, my handwriting
– I must have walked this way last week and dropped it. In December sun, I
hurry past the cathedral like it might get me. Then I saunter, Thoreau-like,
sans-terre in California, and again I’m everything—the spinsters Thoreau
disparaged, the turtles he saw copulating and tried to separate, the mother who
saved him from civilization. Open to alms. My loneliness is like a poem by
Fanny. By this time my parka is off. In the co-op bakery when I get to the
counter, the cashier is dazzled for a minute. "You look like Elizabeth Taylor."
But then he wonders if he’s right not to offer me the senior discount yet. Here
is the crux of the matter. I smile. "Yeah, no,” I say. “Not yet.”

•••
I’d been teaching and tutoring union organizers and San Francisco State
students online since 2018, well before the start of the pandemic, so I was more
comfortable in the digital cloud and the Zoom environment than most people in 2020.
I’d developed a habit of grabbing a stack of books and perching my Mac on top of the
stack for my online classes and meetings. Now everyone and everything was on
Zoom–older friends accidentally muting themselves, looking into the screen with
furrowed brows, mouthing pleas for help that I couldn't hear; children climbing onto
the laps of my students and leaning forward to touch my face through the screen; my
friend Alice in Ireland with a turf fire lit behind her and rain lashing at the
windowpanes.

Almost all of my encounters took place in the cloud: doctor’s visits, poetry
readings, tutoring sessions with labor organizers in Philly, San Francisco, and the
Central Valley of California, the launch of my new book, my birthday party. And
when those sessions ended, the abrupt silence and loneliness were sometimes hard to
bear. I envied people who could say goodbye at the end of a Zoom meeting and turn
to talk with a spouse or child in an actual room. But I also knew that some of my
friends were bickering and suffering claustrophobia, fear, and burnout with too many
people doing too much in a small space. I didn’t think I’d be good at that kind of
thing anymore, after years of being on my own.

During lockdown, I canceled plans to travel to New York, Boston, and Ireland
to share the new book on which I'd been working for so long. My daughter had

20
returned after six years in Portland and I felt lucky to have her near. I saw no one but
her, her boyfriend, and my son, and even those encounters were limited by fear of
getting or spreading Covid. Almost everything was closed, literally and
metaphorically. "Cerrado, cerrado, todos cerrado," says Reinaldo Arenas played by
Javier Bardem in Before Night Falls; he is facing his mortality while looking out the
window of a cab on his way to the hospital, soon to die of AIDS. This new plague and
these new lies and blame (Asian Americans suffering the worst of it) echoed that awful
era.

The way masked people in the streets now veered away from each other,
averting their eyes–for me it was as if a kind of love affair was ending. No longer could
I be a “walker in the city” like Alfred Kazan or Charles Reznikoff or Frank O'Hara. “I
do this I do that” was limited to what happened in the rooms of my apartment. I
found I couldn’t write anything without the accidents and incidents of public
engagement. So I invented an artistic practice to be with the living and the dead in
New York and Ireland and New England and elsewhere, all alone at my desk in
Oakland—meditations in another emergency, the unbelievable yet inevitable obscenity
of America in 2020 and 2021 during the Trump regime. The poems here are the best
of what came out of that practice from May 12, 2020-August 26, 2021.

Having no access to libraries because of Covid-19 made me grateful for an

excuse to re-encounter my own books. After each Zoom class or meeting, I'd
photograph the randomly-grabbed stack on which I’d perched my computer, and then
open each book and choose one line from the recto page (no flipping through pages);
from these lines in sequence, I'd compile the poem, date it, and maybe title it.

A cento, it's called—when you appropriate and mix lines from other work into
something of your own, when you seek and find and juxtapose (for examples, see
Maureen McLane’s My Poets and Annie Dillard’s Mornings Like This: Found Poems).
Prior to the pandemic, I'd made collages and poems out of various things before,
appropriating and rearranging language from a knitting manual, a manual about
singing, Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays, Yelp reviews of California's prisons and jails,
and stage directions in "A Raisin in the Sun.” But my mind wasn’t nimble enough
during lockdown to do anything playful. I was frozen and plodding, proceeding on
faith, trying to establish some kind of practice that would move me toward sanity and
fresh engagement with the written word.

In a list of suggestions about how to break writer’s block, teacher Roy Peter
Clark suggests working "in surprising forms from which no one expects excellence." I

21
thought of Reznikoff’s use of court documents as a source for poetry (Justin Parks: “In
Testimony, Reznikoff doesn’t so much write poetry as find the poetry implicit in legal
briefs.”) Now I found (or invented) such a form. I wasn't exactly "blocked”; I was
stunned. I had used up all my stamina on writing, editing, and finding a new publisher
for Wite Out after my friend and first publisher, Bill Corbett, died. Wite Out included
poems, but I hadn’t written poetry in a long while, having worked so hard on revising
and editing the prose in that book about intimacy, race, loss, and love.

My new practice of making poems from books in my Zoom stacks (or

pedestals) brought me back to the possibilities of lines and line breaks and stanzas,
caesuras and enjambment and voltas, punctuation and titles, and abstraction in
language. I was working procedurally and under duress. My writing had often been
about the past smashing into the present (narrator and characters, plus incident and
recursion). Now, in a fog, alone, I was creating a present with language itself.

Sometimes the practice felt desperate, like trying to do something supple with
slabs of stone or timber beams. But if I could just show up to do the work, I might
cultivate the openness and attention that makes meaning out of chance. I might, as
Walter Benjamin wanted to, "make something from words the way wine is made from
grapes."

I will acquaintance strangle

And look strange

William Shakespeare

There was magic at work once I committed to the practice. My preoccupations

and even my voice somehow came through in the words of others. The compiling of
attributions for each poem created small communities of writers, including my friends,
living and dead. The juxtapositions that at first seemed clunky and absurd now seemed
fated.

5.26.2020 [Cloud of Witnesses]

"A divine enticement," a "labyrinth," a "trap":

They all sat very still.
In dreams you see through solids!
How like looking through seawater
is the work of memory.

22
 I knew only that I was composed
of several breeds,
a different thing altogether
from knowing that one has to go on
indefinitely, repeating the same order,
and we never become known
to the larger public.

Attributions: Simone Weil Reader, ed. George

Panichas; Fanny Howe, The Wages; Fanny
Howe, The Lives of the Spirit /Glasstown;
Fanny Howe, Tis of Thee; Fanny Howe, What
Did I Do Wrong?; Simone Weil, The Need for
Roots; Robert Hershon, Freeze Frame.

Soon I looked forward to these encounters with my old books and margin notes from
decades ago. I felt dull and entirely uncreative because I was alone and afraid. But the
books didn’t know that. They lay open to discovery.

Stacking/opening/finding/making/juxtaposing/breaking: disparate authors and

themes started to seem adjacent, connected, meant-to-be (bashert) in these poems.
Partly that was because some of the same authors appeared in various stacks. And my
old self, married, innocent, young, pre-internet, very East Coast, was also in some of
those books I’d annotated and hadn’t looked at in years. So was the previous epidemic
that killed my brother Joseph and so many others in the 1980s and 1990s.

•••
In early 2020, Breonna Taylor (26 years old) and then Ahmaud Arbery (25)
were murdered. A posse of white men chased and ambushed Arbery while he was
jogging in Glynn County, Georgia. Two months after his murder, because Arbery’s
family fought the lies of the police department, charges were filed against his
murderers. Impulsively, after reading the news of Arbery’s murder, I broke my
quarantine and drove over to Isabella Street in West Oakland to give my son a hug.
That was the day that a friend of my friends died of Covid in New York. I remember
my son’s face when I told him about it; his smile vanished. Not for long, though. He
jumped into my car, pulled me close and took a picture of us with his phone. We were
both unmasked. By the time I got home, he had posted it on Instagram with the

23
caption “As close as we can be.” That’s where my daughter discovered I’d gone out,
unmasked, risking infection. That night, on the phone with her, I tried to explain, but
I really didn’t have a good excuse, and in a pained voice, she told me that I’d have to
wait a few weeks before seeing her again, as she was trying to protect herself and her
boyfriend from contagion. I was shocked. This was the first time I'd ever felt torn
between my children, the only people I was seeing at all at that time.

Then George Floyd was murdered. This was the same as the other murders,
but different; the officer kneeled on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, while
other officers watched and did nothing, and a crowd begged him to stop. In the video,
he stares back impassively at the young woman filming him. He knows that cops are
immune from prosecution when it comes to Black lives.

But this time was different.

Instead of hiding indoors, people masked
up and came out to protest. In Oakland,
the crowds were huge. I went out too. I'd
been going to these protests since Oscar
Grant's murder in Oakland in 2009. I’d
never seen anything like this; I mean, I’d
never seen so many white people at a
protest for Black lives lost. Now there
were thousands and thousands of people
at the marches and in the caravan
through the Port of Oakland and around
Lake Merritt, past the Alameda County
Courthouse where Huey Newton,
founder of the Black Panthers, had been
tried for killing a police officer.

The George Floyd protests were

a rare example of interracial coalition. In
the vanguard of the car caravan, there
were many Asian American protesters with "Yellow Peril" signs; Trump had made
them targets of virulent racism by scapegoating them for the spread of Covid-19. I was
amazed at the scale of these gatherings, and also doubtful that anything would change;
a cynicism borne of American history, post-Obama politics, and bracing reminders
from Black friends about harsh truths.

24
 I was still so weak after my bout with Covid that I couldn’t walk very fast. I felt
like I’d aged ten years in just three months. (I fell down in the street three times that
spring; I'm better now.) The Anti-Police Terrorism Network brought us together in
spite of restrictions, in masks, at a healthy distance, in our cars—6000 of them. Then
Oakland Tech students and other high school students organized a march of 13,000
people to police headquarters. The city imposed a curfew; we broke it one night as we
looked up at police snipers on the roofs of buildings in downtown Oakland. Protesters
ready to rumble waved signs up at the cops on the roofs: “FUCK YOUR RACIST
CURFEW.” Police wagons were stationed at every intersection. But there were no
shots fired that night, and curfew was lifted the next day.

•••
Except for the protests and as much walking as I could manage, I was stuck in
my apartment, surrounded by books I'd read to death, or half-read, or barely touched.
My new poetry practice gave me a reason to look into those books every day during a
time when I, like so many others, lacked the concentration to do much
more. Whatever Zoom meeting I'd just finished (or movie I'd watched, or reading I'd
given) would inevitably inform the mood of the poem—after all, I was exercising some
kinds of choice within the limits of my strict parameters.

I was discovering that almost any stack I grabbed from my shelves seemed to
include a book by the poet, novelist, and mystic Fanny Howe, so her lines and voice
threaded through things, and set a tone:

By combining chance with deliberate choice,

I wanted to suffer on the page.

I took pictures of the stacks, the spines of the books. I'd compile the attributions at the
bottom of each poem.

I shared some of this on social media during those days when we were all
hungry for news, when most of our contact was through social media and everyone, it
seemed, was baking bread and posting pictures of it on Instagram. My friends liked
some of the poems better than others—so did I, of course (here you see just 30 of the
60-something poems I made from May 2020 to August, 2021). People appreciated
the juxtapositions of the attributions—the likely and unlikely company that came
together so strangely and satisfyingly in each poem (e.g., the big blue AA book and
Ludwig Wittgenstein and living and dead poets Katie Peterson and Uche Nduke and

25
Robert Creeley, all at the same pandemic party). I was glad that most of my
bookshelves were a mess, things shoved here and there in no particular order. For
years, I'd been meaning to organize my books, but for this practice, mess was best.

Wite Out, like my first book, The Public Gardens: Poems and History, is made of
diaries—worked, re-worked, augmented, redacted—juxtaposed with poems. And I see
that though it is entirely different, Cloud of Witnesses also works as a sort of diary, a
record of my online appointments with doctors, my first trip to the library after it
opened again in June 2020, deaths, my children, things I watched (Issa Rae's Insecure
and the films of Charles Burnett) and read (Christina Sharpe's In the Wake, and James
Baldwin's No Name in the Street:"We hoped that no further disasters would whiten the
bleaching year.", online poetry readings (mine and others); the California fires and the
day the sky turned black and orange, and America's monstrous violence and history.
Everything that was happening, and not happening, is there in the poems in some
way, though the actual words always come from the works cited.

When pulling things for my Zoom stacks, I never touched my more organized,
curated shelves (my "special" shelves). What if I'd made a stack of all the books I'd
acquired as an editor at the University of California Press (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's
Dictee, Ruth Wilson Gilmore's Golden Gulag, Lorine Niedecker's Collected Poems,
Harryette Mullen's Sleeping with the Dictionary, a biography of Bayard Rustin, and
books by Yunte Huang, Lyn Hejinian, and Jelly Roll Morton)? Or books that featured
my collages on their covers? Or my collection of Anchor paperback classics, many with
covers by Edward Gorey, or the self-help books in my bedroom? I kept them behind
the door, shelved with their spines against the wall. I didn’t need to be reminded how
hard I’d tried to change what I could and accept what I couldn't, how desperate I’d
been to "heal the shame that binds." What if I'd allowed myself to rifle around in each
of those books, looking for just the right line, instead of choosing from whatever
arbitrary pages miscellaneous books supplied? Then I'd have a book of poems by me
and about me. Instead of what was given.

I followed the rules of my practice to the letter until, one day in July, I pulled a
pile of books off the children’s stack in my bedroom. First on the stack was the third
volume of March, Congressman John Lewis’s graphic novel series about the 1963
March on Washington. I opened the book to a random recto page and found the
grave words that would begin my poem:

I spent the day alone in my apartment,

watching President Kennedy's funeral.

26
 Then I glanced at the rest of the books in the stack I'd pulled off the shelf, and
I realized I'd have to adjust my practice and make conscious choices about what came
next; otherwise, the language of children’s books might trivialize those first lines and
devolve into whimsical nonsense. So I chose what seemed right in each book in the
stack. And somehow the poem—with lines from Maurice Sendak, P. D. Eastman,
William Steig, Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad, and Kay Thompson's Eloise books—
lived up to Lewis's opening lines about the Birmingham bombing.

7.17.2020 ["I can't believe you're still alive"]

I spent the day alone in my apartment,

watching President Kennedy's funeral.
I kept thinking about Medgar Evers
and the little girls in Birmingham,
escapees from a magician's dream.
"What on earth are you talking about?"
There was a silver moon rising in the sky.

I looked like Nothing, nothing at all,

and when I looked up,
there stood the dear little child,
wearing the same little dress.

If you do not understand

simply nod your head and say,
"No comprendo."
You absolutely have to
have your camera ready at all times.

How could anything

so terribly wrong
be allowed to happen?
Tears from on her eyelashes–
Her mother's work–
"I did have a mother. I know
I did, I have to find her."

27
 They went back to the woods
and looked on the dark paths.
Here's to friendship, family, and
more shared adventures in the year ahead.

Attributions: John Lewis, Andrew Aydin,

Nate Powell, March: Book Three; Clive
Barker, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War;
James Herriot, Bonny's Big Day; Amy Ehrlich
and Robert Andrew Parker, Zeek Silver
Moon; Aileen Fisher, Like Nothing at All;
Wilhelm Grimm and Maurice Sendak, Dear
Mili; Kay Thompson, Eloise in Moscow; Kay
Thompson, Eloise at the Plaza; William
Steig, Brave Irene; P. D. Eastman, Are You
My Mother?; Arnold Lobel, Frog and Toad
Are Friends; Rosa Miller and Ben Johnson,
York Street 2014-2016

The Birmingham bombing had already manifested itself on the pages of another book
in my stacks, Alice Kaplan’s Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier
Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis. (See the poem “7.3.2020 [Decreole].”)

The night I made the John Lewis poem, I had dinner in Berkeley with my
daughter and her boyfriend and my friend Rita and her family. I hadn’t seen anyone at
all in a really long time. We tapped elbows, looking over our masks, trying to smile
with our eyes. All of us, except for the youngest, were a bit stiff with fear. But that
girl, Josephine, is very talkative. Her chatter distracted us from our sadness and fear,
and we had fun.

On the way home I stopped at the Safeway to get wine. In the dark parking
lot, alone again, I checked Twitter and saw a post from writer John Keene announcing
that Congressman John Lewis had died that day. I realized that his passing might
have happened around the time I was collaging his poem, "I Can’t Believe You’re Still
Alive."

For the next few days, all of the poems I found/made also seemed to be for
John Lewis, and for the country he'd been trying to turn into a democracy all of his
life. His spirit was in the bardo, and in this world, a world crackling with trouble,
good and bad.

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