Cynical counsel soiled the land again
today, as the President of the United
States teased the People with bon-bon
treats of temporary mercy for his fav-
orite whipping-boy, his captive con-
stituent without papers. Yes. His own
constituents are all persons subject
to the equal protection of our laws.
He does not understand this. He does
not understand anything having to do
with his Office. For each reluctant
day we share or suppress conscious-
ness of this affront, its cost, its
ignominy in humanity's helpless wit-
ness, his fattening on the nation's
humiliation is protected by no law,
but by a Party which claims, lions
in secured cages, to find no wrong.
The path through this wilderness re-
veals itself as a caravan, correct-
ing disbelief and passive torment.
An internal migration, overdue, is
under way, approaching clearing.
After hard rain the eaves repeat their beads,
those trees exhale your doubt like mantled tapers,
drop after drop, like a child's abacus
beads of cold sweat file from high tension wires,
pray for us, pray for this house, borrow your neighbor's
faith, pray for this brain that tires,
and loses faith in the great books it reads,
after a day spent prone, hemorrhaging poems,
each phrase peeled from the flesh in bandages,
arise, stroll on under a sky
sodden as kitchen laundry,
while the cats yawn behind their window frames,
lions in cages of their choice,
no further, though, than your last neighbor's gates
figured with pearl. How terrible is your own
fidelity, O heart, O rose of iron!
. . .
The Gulf and Other Poems
The Walk
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969©
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