II.iv

February 21, 1994


The events which have happened
        and those (more philosophical)
    which might happen                          Aristotle Poetics 9.2

How far back must we search
        the source of this separation
    through which poetry has shrunk

from being the truth of the tribe
        to a tolerated indulgence
    in a productive world?

And if we ask    as have those
        who have given us justice and the state
    (The Tao: when justice appears

so does great confusion                               Tao Te Ching 18
           Unde hoc malum?. Whence this evil?               Brown 394
    the problematic answer

is Far! Very far!
        the heavy cannon
    on the hills above Sarajevo

and now in Orahovac
        from centuries of reaction
    to the tyranny of the Turks

after Sultan Murad
        at the Battle of Kosovo
    liberated the Bogomils

from Christian persecution
        to enter the light of Islam
    as before them the Berber

Donatists most of them country people
        simple folk who did not even know Latin         Jones II, 955
    then rose up from the latifundia                    rural estates

across North Africa
        to welcome the armies of the Vandals
    and after them Mohammed

It was St. Augustine
        who made the painful decision 
    to persecute them

and enforce the word with power
        (Fearfulness and trembling are come over me
    and horror overwhelmed me

and I said     O that I had the wings of a dove
        for then I would fly away                          Psalm 55:2
    and be at rest                          Aug. Ep. 95, 3; Brown 243

but nonetheless it was better
        that a few perish in their own flames
    than that all should burn in the flames of Hell!) Aug. Ep. 204, 2;
                                                            Brown 336

whose mother Monnica (a Berber name)                        Frend 230
        had like the Donatist peasants
    set out food for the saints 

and even before that the decision
        to discover a fragment
    of the cross to conquer with

from the top to the bottom
        a worldly restitution
    that leads to the eternity of downfall               Benjamin 313

reverting a global message
        back to a tribal one
    ringed by the ominously oppressed

and where in such African regions
        as Hippo Diarrhytos (Bizerte)
    the Catholic landowners

would not trouble to hand Circumcellions
        over to Augustine to be `instructed':
    they merely dealt with them on the spot                 Brown 241

so there today the college-educated
        Algerian military junta
    still deal in like fashion with the Hamas

And where in the Middle East
        the persecutions of the Nestorians
    and Monophysites and Monotheletes

by the imperial Councils
        of Chalcedon and Constantinople            451 C.E.; 680 C.E.
    led to the 19th-Century

massacres of Maronites
        by the Hakimite Druses
    the French occupation of Syria

and most recently the displacement
        of Lebanese moderates in the 
    Switzerland of the Middle East

by the troops of the Phalange
        the murder of Bashir Gemayel 
    and retaliatory massacres

in the Sabra and Shatila camps
        Hezbollah, the taking of hostages
    the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks                Newman 218

orthodoxy always the doctrine
        enforced with political power
    hence it always makes room

for the corrupting influence of state
        It is this legacy
    that we in the East and West

have been left to believe in
        my father's belief in law
    and hence in sovereignty

being what I lost that year
        with the post-war best and brightest
    protecting the needs of our states

in the Third Committee
        against the spectre
    of the UN Charter on Human Rights

no place to be mindful
        the other choice -- St. Martin
    who chose to convert

from the bottom not the top
        the pagani of the countryside
    whom Augustine never knew

Martin whose powers were weakened
        when he went in vain to the bishops
    to plead for a heretic's life --        Sulp. Sev. Dial. II.xiii;
                                                           Hoare 137

by now the forgotten one 
        In his place the Maoism
    of the Long March

which answered millennia
        of mandarin indifference
    to the fate of peasants

with the Cultural Revolution
        the armies of Tienanmen
    and now the Khmères Rouges

killing people on highways
        for driving a motor car
    We have seen it

from Lebanon to Afghanistan
        where it decays to war
    of city against countryside

(the fatal weakness
        of Lenin's conspiratorial
    revolution at the top

to enforce by will
        the apocalyptic telos
    of the peaceable kingdom)

the countryside will win
        and what is proven
    is not the weakness of books

(the faith in leadership
        in the Thoughts of the poet Mao
    is from the Book of Odes)

but of the cities' loss
        of restraint by words
    till the rich compete

to impoverish the poor
        Those who search for evil                           Brown 394
   (which is the excuse for power)

have always prevailed
        Sulpicius Severus who recorded
    how Saint Martin felt

from his guilty communion with bishops
        in order to save a sinner
    a diminution of spiritual power)        Sulp. Sev. Dial. II.xiii;
                                                           Hoare 137

(a loss such as Gandhi felt)                Kytle 173; Scott '88 116
        later condemned by Augustine
    as a semi-Pelagian

for his belief it is not from genes
        or the fall of Eve 
    that we have seen evil prevail

(much as Wang Yang-ming believed
        in the truth of original mind
    unselfish not beclouded)                 Wang Yang-ming; Chan 674

but from mala condotta             evil governance; Dante Purg.16.103
a world ill-governed in our time 



II.v

Quick! first stack the plates
        pushed through the wicket window
    dump glasses dunk flatware

meat goes in can for the dog
        the rest into the garbage
    scour out enormous pots

I could have slept in as a child
        which don't even fit in the sink
    say You're welcome! to those

who peek through and say Thanks!
        maybe some two hundred servings
    in the space of one hour

more near the end of the month
        when the homeless are waiting
    for their next welfare checks

I owe to Ronna 
        this nostalgia of working hard
    one hour a week in the soup kitchen

at the McGee Avenue Baptist Church
        (it is years since I have used my hands
    like this though I remember

kitchen work somewhere in my youth
        the stoop labor in the tobacco fields)
    or some days taking the names

as they come filing in
        so many of them it strikes me
    writing their names left-handed

misfits who with my better luck
        might have become poets
    who have been joking some time outside

even when it is raining (though once
        Mack had to phone the police)
    when things are hopeless enough

you no longer have to worry!
        not by any means all black 
    like the family of deaf-mutes

signing excitedly
        except when carrying their trays
    the blind Byron whom I

got to serve at table
        because he liked to talk about Byron
    and by then it had got around

I was an English teacher
        not just at a high school
    like Winston who sets out the forks

but at the university
        especially after Selma
    who helps serve vegetables

on the women's side of the kitchen
        (that is -- next to the stove)
    and who has been to Europe 

on a Berkeley Co-op travel package
        in one and the same week
    saw Ronna's Glamor magazine

piece on Dieters Feed the Hungry
        and me on TV
    and made much of this

after one of the prayer circles
        when for a minute we join hands
    asking the spirit to join us

and those outside we are about to feed
        I want all of you to know
    that our Ronna here

is DOCTOR Ronna Kabatznick
        Well! now it's my turn
    to tell all of you

Isaac who could never get me to slow down
        Betty the former cook
    at whose reception we served

after she got remarried
        to someone in the line
    Mack so silent the day

his son had been found dead
        Mrs. Harper whose granddaughter was murdered
    (you know about trials

all you women who spoke
        at Pearl's funeral
    about how you had moved together

from Richmond to Berkeley
        to worship at the same church)
    how grateful we are

not just because it is easier
        to walk through the heaps
    of seated bodies on the sidewalks

near the Automated Teller Machines
        much as Gibbon described them 
    clogging the city streets

in his Decline and Fall
        of the Roman Empire
    because it is a privilege

to encounter dignity
        the dignity of those in the line
    (the old lady in a knitted tam

who chews so quietly
        through three successive servings
    after a while you get to know

the ones who will say Thank you)
        but above all your dignity
    who organized this kitchen

for what you thought at first
        would be only one winter
    because it was a job

someone had to take care of
        and come back day after day
    with patience

and the grace of simplicity
        Eliot talked about in Wordsworth
    from trying to imitate

and as far as possible to adopt
        the very language of men
    as a profound spiritual revival              Eliot '34 74, 75, 80

no less than an education
        to speak more simply
    to be in touch again

as when in my youth I felt
        this good ache in my shoulders
    from scything during the war

with work so very simple
        we need only do it
    without raising any question

it has to be done



II.vi

February 19, 1994


They banished Solzhenitsyn to the West
        where he preached against détente
    and the rot of Western life

billboards and tabloids
        the lyrics of rock music
    the exploits of Daniel Ellsberg

"Freedom! to divulge 
        the defense secrets of one's country
    for personal political gain"                           Remnick 70

and because of his knowledge
        of Soviet defense secrets
    they imprisoned Sakharov at home

leaving Solzhenitsyn by default
        to exploit his reputation
    as the dominant writer of this century

causing the nouveaux philosophes
        like André Glucksmann
    to take a strong anti-Communist stance

and end the spell of Jean-Paul Sartre                  Remnick 70, 73
        as well as encourage those
    inside and outside the Agency

who agreed that the U.S.
        was still "being deceived
    There are still P.O.W.s in Vietnam"                    Remnick 74

whereas Sakharov could speak only
        in the quiet of his living room
    to people like you Dan                            Daniel Ellsberg

leaving us to wonder
        what if the Cold War
    as you and Sakharov had wished

had ended in disarmament
        instead as Solzhenitsyn had wished
    being "essentially won

by Ronald Reagan when he embarked
        on the Star Wars program
    and the Soviet Union

could not take this next step"                             Remnick 77
        Star Wars a response
    to the predictable finding of the B Team 

that CIA Estimates
        had underestimated Soviet strength
    the United States had not prepared sufficiently      Ranelagh 623

and this in turn on the alleged
        telemetry doublecross
    and war of the moles                          Epstein 162-99, 260

a war not noticed by my colleagues
        who had marched so many times
    and been driven into hopeful

intensities of togetherness
        and high eloquence
    by the simplicities of Vietnam

As Plato once wrote
        you cannot be both powerful in the state
    and unlike it in character                     Plato Gorgias 513B

but it was not just those wishing peace
        even Kissinger
    sent a memo to the White House

we recommend that the President
        not receive Solzhenitsyn                           Remnick 72
    the net result of the clamor

coming partly from Helms's CIA
        and in a small way
    perhaps even from myself

(when I put Jeff Gerth on to 
        the Murchisons and Fisher Island
    the secret name Angleton

Nixon and the Mafia                            Weissman 251, 265, 270
        not knowing what dark forces
    were engaged in domestic battle

high over our civilian heads)
        the net result of all this
    was to bring down Nixon Kissinger

in the end William Colby
        thus opening up the way
    to Carter and Brzezinski

pushing through a decision
        to support the opium-growing
    Afghan rebels                  Scott '91 178, 254; Brzezinski 427

and then Bush and the B Team
        the Bloomingdale Kitchen Cabinet
    General Graham's High Frontier     Marshall Scott & Hunter 62, 76

supported by Texas oilmen
        who from the early '80s
    were lusting after Central Asian oil

It would be wrong to
        derive some Manichaean moral
    there was no one evil strain

it having been the great
        Enlightenment failing
    to demonize church or class

No! I can agree like Havel
        with some of Solzhenitsyn's obsessions
    the need for a spiritual dimension

the need for the East
        to see capitalism and democracy
    with a clear eye                                    Remnick 74-75

his view of Yeltsin's mistake
        in appointing Gaidar
    a theorist under the influence

of the International Monetary Fund
        with total ignorance
    of the situation in Russia                             Remnick 78

And despite his so-called
        poems in the English language
    which appear in every public place

I can agree with Brodsky
        (who inspired Susan Sontag to suggest
    that the Reader's Digest

had been more accurate than The Nation
        in its assessment of Communism)                    Remnick 73
    that Western man

is a mental bourgeois
        who cherishes his mental comfort
    It is almost impossible for him

to admit disturbing evidence                               Remnick 73
        one must admire both of them
    in a tyranny a real writer

is like a second government                                Remnick 79
        their ability to stand up
    and push history back

even if in a wrong direction
        unlike the thinkers of the west
    using ghostly Marxist dialect

in their classroom wargames
        But if you Dan and Sakharov
    had been the ones who had been heard

and given us disarmament
        would we now have in Afghanistan
    the Hezb-i-Islami of Hekmatyar

the bombing of the World Trade Center
the slaughters in Sarajevo?