Palm
Sunday
By
Frederick Seidel
Manhattan
shrinks to a tiny tooth
Of
towers far below as we accelerate violently into verse and space
And
leave the road behind.
Congress
is having a stroke, and it’s a heart attack, and it can’t face
China
and the truth
Fulminating
from Duluth.
Everest
is the penthouse of the Earth and God is on my mind,
But
I’m more interested in getting off the Earth to your Down Under.
My
spirituality is to go hypersonic—
And
fly hypersonically out of New York on the Hampton Jitney to Sagaponack,
Where
the grass is green as the green of a Memling and the sky is you,
Where
the gulls cry with white wings and the waves gush fresh as dew.
The
time has come for magnitudes of thunder
To
split the vast nonsense of death asunder.
My
subject is New York out my window where
The
world is a mirage in the nude.
My
subject is the Sunday-morning TV talk shows, which I,
Loving
politics, eat like food.
I
must say, Palm Sunday means nothing to me.
I don’t care.
It’s
almost time to nail Christ to the air.
It’s
almost Easter and the pundit is in the sky.
I
hope there really is another universe—
New
evidence says there must be—where Jesus isn’t born,
Nor
the Buddha, nor Mohammed, all the porn.
Evidence
indeed suggest other universes, nursed by the universe breast,
The
Big Bang being the breast, the first suck being the best,
Because
that suck is the void in reverse.
Then
came the Pharisees, Pontius Pilate, six million Jews killed, and worse.
Close
your eyes while you read this
Default
setting for the Divinity.
It’s
Mohammed in the cave and the angel commanding: Recite!
Close
your eyes to see infinity.
God
bless the bliss
of
the kiss
Of
Judas Iscariot that won’t come out right,
But
comes out right. It’s in 3-D. It’s an illusion.
Mecca
today in the Arab sunlight is a white bridal gown.
The
Buddha smiling at a stoplight sees the red nose of a clown.
The
Central Park Zoo barking seals that you love, darling,
Sun
themselves in the same sunlight as the talkative starling
Who
imitates a car alarm, saying thereby that the world is delusion
And
the Holocaust merely a contusion.
Broadways
is kneeling next to my building. Christ
Mounts
the ass to go into town.
Guatama
is teaching on 79th at the corner.
Mohammed
rides through Harlem in a white convertible with the top down.
God
the stallion and God the gelding is sliced
Into
bite-sized portions, they put out a contract on him, iced,
Into
the river in cement shoes, ends up at the coroner
Astronomer
who is looking for complicity,
For
sympathetic understanding from a universe
Turning
violently into verse.
A
poem should not mean but be.
Oh
really?
My
poems have the cedar simplicity
Of
a shoe tree.
Picture
me in front of the TV
Staring
at a mirage.
The
events of the week in the world break the flat-screen surface like fish.
They
are caught and cleaned and cooked and given a massage.
I’m
climbing the dunes of the Sahara with a mermaid swimming toward me
Talking
away, as if she were afraid she’d already bored me.
I
hear her empathetic politics, spoken in English English,
Part
of the TV panel of pundits in Washington, D.C., on this Palm Sunday.
When
I escape to this window for a moment to breathe New York,
Something
white is flying through the sky that is not a stork.
I
think about the people who have died and are dead.
I
don’t think they have gone somewhere else instead.
I
don’t think I will see them again one day.
I
don’t think China will overtake the U.S. before Monday.
Harper’s
Magazine, August 2012
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