Your Diamond Shoe
by Michael Palmer
Don’t write poems about what’s going on.
Murderers and liars, dreams and desires,
they’re always going on.
Leave them outside the poem.
Don’t describe your sad-eyed summer home
or wide-eyed winter home.
Don’t write about being homeless
or your home-away-from-home.
Don’t write about war,
whether you’re against or for,
it’s the same fucking war.
Don’t talk about language,
don’t talk about loss.
Don’t mention truth or beauty
or your grandpa’s bones.
No one wants to know
how your father/brother/lover
deducted himself. Razor, rope or gun,
what’s the difference?
Whisper nothing of the snow
on the Contrescarpe,
nothing of moths, their fluttering arcs,
or the towers—how we watched them fall.
Don’t write at all.
after Drummond
–
One senses the deep frustration of Palmer in this poem (from Company of Moths, New Directions Publishing, 2005), the raw anger that animates the irony in the imperative to stay the pen and watch the world fall into further horror years after 9-11. We count the years as we count the bodies that fall by the wayside of civilization’s march toward civilization. [Aren't we there yet?] The “we” we speak of here is clearly not the same company “we” all keep and so our arrivals and trajectories remain varied, stratified, layered, according to the shoes one sees fit to keep. Thus the continued investment in language, in words that inflate the meaning and value of democracy and knowledge, as if words do flatten the world and level the field, as if life’s essentials are free and murderers do not freely roam the streets. In the world of this poem of Palmer’s, one finds oneself in the difficult position of seeing the absence of difference between words and between the real-life objects they represent. Of course one can always make a dialectical materialist argument contrary to the Wittgensteinian position. Still, what difference will it make? To will the future with mere words, with the purest possible intent for poetry, will that prevent our own towers of hope from falling, from crumbling into the dispersed dust of history?
