His Crusade
Cut from that plum job and running, like anyone, for anything
To hold body and soul together, you look more
Like us now--scared but still peevish, defeated, but still possessing
A hint of hauteur, the last remnant of the visage
Of a commanding breed: sleek, well-tailored, insouciant,
And without memory of defeat. You cling to your decades
(Or was it centuries?) of hegemony like armor,
The old decorated breastplates and dull mail leggings
That brought fear to those you defended
As well as those you conquered.
We’ve sailed back to those once-pristine islands
You rewarded to your paladins, found streets thick
With stick-thin dogs and children worse, like ghosts,
Their mothers dead from the first wave of raiders,
Their fathers dead, in retreat, or treating with the enemy:
Quisling, marked, repulsive.
After Szymanowski’s Op. 2 Nocturne and Tarantella
This all must begin with a man
hunched over it—in trench coat,
in an unpromising, short brimmed hat,
looking in on a sleeping child.
It had to seem suspicious, no one would think it
anything but suspicious, but we knew
it was the old country countryman
at long last met with his estranged and stolen
child.
From far away, from that country
he’d thought he left forever
so long ago, he tracked the man
who stole his wife and stole his child.
He walked the streets of his old homeland
again, and was crowded and narrowed by
turrets and bayed windows and
felt again he was shinnying through
a tunnel, desperate again to escape.
He looked and looked but found only
the lost addresses again, and had to
make it all the way back home
and speak to his mother, again
seeking some way to find the child in the America
he left. The corner store was rich from his remittances,
the dowdy square alive and flower-freshened
from the happy efforts his townsmen made,
but the broad wound of his lost love and daughter
could only be healed from here—he knew,
by a mystery neither he nor I can speak,
that he here would find some key.
What shade did he know to find here, what talent,
forgotten or buried, would emerge
before his eyes?
The simple motions of the village revealed no mysteries,
and his fellows there, first envious, were now
amused at the once-legendary remitter,
and laughed behind his back and made
jokes at his expense to their wives
and older children.
He sat in tavern brighter with neon
than any he’d remembered there, and
when the nocturne broke into the tarantella,
something broke through his mind’s
stern inner gaze. Two school friends
sat with him, one on each side, seeming
friendly, looking askance, and as the
long-faced woman with her long full hair
began the violin tarantella, he remembered
exactly the look of the man who had stood
by the house so many days, exactly the look
of the automobile he drove, his thin face,
his knobby hands, his breath redolent of Kreteks
as he walked by and into the building.
It was not the nocturne but the tarentella
the completed the story, that brought him
back to America, that caught and devoured him,
then put him back at his daughter’s side.
