A poem from a set written not long after we moved to Shanghai and settled down in the French Concession near the old publisher’s row on Shaoxing Lu (once known as the Rue Victor-Emmanuel III). It was published at some point in Sal Mimeo. I tend not to think about old poems much, but the recent surge in American-Iranian saber rattling in the US media have sent me back a few times to this one. Lots of 2006 references here, with “BOMB IRAN” being the closer.
WORLD BANK CARD ALBUM
for Kevin Davies
We wish we could drop it
The defining massacre of the moment
Ours, the day a diastole
flooding with blood and vowels
O say wait what not to come
Let’s face “our moment”
In fidelity to the imagined-as-forgotten:
We knew she’d be there, up to her neck in the frozen river
The important thing now
Is more orders, ones requiring less
Loss of top-shelf self in the supply chain
Than this which requires guilt and admission
You have to take the train
To Lhasa before the rest of you
Here hit the dice: I misread 1 a.m. as I AM
Again, radio on
Rhetorician in Maine woods!
A long haul from bad nights’ sleep
Upon sleep, and then, again and there
On the other end of the beam a stranger
One of countless broken means
The floating world of cartoon bears
Like ictus means a meter or a seizure
The body’s prosody buried in thin
Dirt above the creek below the cave
In the Reading Room it’s Illy
Flipping through the World Bank Card Album
Shangainese retirees waltz amidst the fumes
I mistranslate shaoxing both ways as “little happiness”
LA Times editorial opines: BOMB IRAN (11/9/06)
The Chinese DVD pirate pundit speaks