A singer called Blue came shambling up out of the dark/jaybird/tenant farmer, your sinner, your whole yard hurt
And when the magic of his song died down we looked around, and the plantation manager had crept out of the church
There are the riven lives of the velocity, the time it takes to have been triad or tried and not as easy as good versus bad, as gospel backs into shock
has brevity going for it
or pasture
Your city, nevermind it, it neither comprehends you nor disappears into conscientious ambiguity, like the plantation, but with no chapel to exit through or gift shop
Influence is often private and guarded, it shuns celebrity, needs no public face, its precincts are reclusive
and when I read
Newark Court Will Not Hear Poet's Lawsuit
The United States Supreme Court declined yesterday to review a lawsuit filed by a former poet laureate of New Jersey challenging the elimination of his post. Without comment, the court declined to hear the case. In March, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that state officials were immune from the suit brought by the former poet laureate, Amiri Baraka. Gov. James E. McGreevey eliminated the post in July 2003 amid an uproar over Mr. Baraka’s poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” a work referring to 9/11. The governor and Legislature had been barred from firing Mr. Baraka, and eliminated his post instead. He sued, claiming free speech rights had been violated.
I thought about blowing out unlit candles, about the scope of a man's influence strobing into copacetic pantomimes of the pressure you use to notice something concentric occurring within a square boundary, accruing there, the tangle of heroes and locals, or go-tell-it-on-the-mountain, but how naive of the one who expects to be let back down
When I get back down
When I get back up again
He threatens permission
Will be the end of estimations
I thought about the kind of technology it would take to make him unsay it, unthink it even
how it was not a matter of sophistication, but one of sophists as in wisdom and your fists as in rhythm blows us up and down the maintenance of letters we lost in ships and found you worshiping. Our power rests and unrests in what is withheld from us, the effort each withholding takes to contain itself shows up at the jealousy on a judge's face when he calls a man guilty just to hear him sing an unjust ballad
They had to come together, all of them, to perform the rite, to repair the web of time where it had been broken
