Joseph - So where are we?: poems

A red tugboat pushes a red and gold barge into the Narrows. A bench in the shadows on a pier in the Hudson. The caf on Cornelia Street, the music, now whose voice might that be? Diffuse, invisible, energy. The flow of data since the attacks has surged. Technocapital, permanently, digitally, semioticized, virtually unlimited in freedom and power, taking billions of bodies on the planet with it. Future, past, cosmogonies, the void, are in whose vision? Ever-deepening, ravenous cruelty, viciousness, annihilation, defended and worshipped.

But is there a more beautiful cityparts of it, anyway? Another path to the harbor, the border between sea and land fluctuating, a line, a curve. Peck Slip to Water Street to Front Street to Pine, to Coenties Slip to Pearl to Stone Street to Exchange Place, the light in majestic degrees. This is a fable. A final nail driven in. The Recording Angel completes the exactest chronicle. Blake, with blazing eyes, loves issues of eternal time.

Gauguin puts a final green on the canvas of the Self-Portrait with Yellow Christ , to complicate the idea. So where were we? The fiery avalanche headed right at usfalling, flailing bodies in midair the neighborhood under thick gray powder on every screen. I dont know where you are, I dont know what Im going to do, I heard a man say; the man who had spoken was myself. What year? Which Southwest Asian war? Smoke from infants brains on fire from the phosphorus hours after theyre killed, killers reveling in the horror. The more obscene the better. The point at which a hundred thousand massacred is just a detail.

Asset and credit bubbles about to burst. Too much consciousness of too much at once, a tangle of tenses and parallel thoughts, a series of feelings overlapping a sudden sensation felt and known, those chains of small facts repeated endlessly, in the depths of silent time. So where are we? My ear turns, like an animals. I listen. Like it or not, a digital you is out there. Half of that citys buildings arent there.

Who was there when something was, and a witness to it? The rich boy general conducts the Pakistani heroin trade on a satellite phone from his cave. On the top floor of the Federal Reserve in an office looking onto Liberty at the South Towers onetime space, the Secretary of the Treasury concedes they got killed in terms of perceptions. Ten blocks away the Church of the Transfiguration, in the back a Byzantine Madonna there is a God, a God who fits the drama in a very particular sense. What you said the memory of a memory of a remembered memory, the color of a memory, violet and black. The lunar eclipse on the winter solstice, the moon a red and black and copper hue. The streets, the harbor, the light, the sky.

The blue and cloudless intense and blue morning sky. No clouds, now, nearer to Brooklyn Bridge than the Bridge is to the Heights. Half a block east, barefoot on shards of glass, a towel wrapped around his waist, shaving cream on the left side of his facea block south, beside a fire hydrant, a leg found severed at the knee. Internal or external what difference does it make? I shake the snow from my coat, take off my gloves, set them on the counter. I step back onto Spring Street, and, on Greenwich, start downtown. Sight and sound reconfigured, details, truths, colors, and shapes round out the aesthetic.

Things changed and unchanged, not just in abstract ways. This young man, yellow pants, undershirt, stands eating from a garbage bin, patches of ice on the East River esplanade. One World Trade Centers structural steel has reached the fifty-second of a hundred and four stories. The light in a pink and a coral, moving through pink and violet scumbled over pink, turning red on violet. That was yesterdays twilightthis afternoon white and gray, and hot. Is everything between six banks and everything else connected, does the old money ultimately determine the new? Its really, really tight out there, how can you not think about it? is her answer, while seated on the sidewalk at the corner of Wall and Broad across from the illuminated Stock Exchange, with backpack and smartphone, mineral water, sleeping bag, bananas, figs, police vans parked on Nassau, helicopters circling overhead, her presence digitally monitored.

In a post-bubble credit-collapse environment three hundred and fifty percent interest rates on payday loans and the multi-trillion-dollar market in credit default swaps are history. Sub-moronthe assistant district attorney bursts into laughterdrops his coin into the pay phone, then goes and orders retaliation from the Tombs. Sundays forecast, the high tide to coincide with Irenes heavy rains and hurricane-force winds, sea level to rise four, five feet at the Battery. And the puzzles surrounding the cosmological constant, spacetime imploded into existence. Ten to fifty years between asbestos breathed and mesothelioma discovered, a rare form of cancer in the lungs or heart, or, if in the stomach, spreading quickly to the liver or spleen. Uploaded onto one of a half a billion or so blogs: The human imagination? A relatively paltry thing, a subproduct, merely, of the neural activity of a species of terrestrial primate; and in another, that other dimension, the Hudson River, black and still, the day about to open at the Narrows edge.

Light on a mountain ash bough, a fresh chills blue sensation in the eyes. One week buds, then the temperatures up and the landscape turns yellow, in a few days the wind scratches the blossoms, in a few weeks the sun scorches the leaves. I, too, see God adumbrations, I, too, write a book on love. Who, here, appears, to touch the skin. Hundreds of thousands of square miles of lost Arctic sea ice, bits of bone on killing grounds, electromagnetic air. Atrocious and bottomless states of mind, natural as air.

And when, then, the imagination is transmogrified into circles of hatred, circles of vengeance and killing, stealing and deceit? Behind the global imperia is the interrogation cell. Its not a good story. Neither the Red Crescent nor journalists are permitted entry, the women tell how men and boys are separated, taken in buses and never seen again, tanks in the streets with machine guns with no shells in the barrels because the army fears that those who will use them might defect. Who knows what has happened, what is happening, what will happen? God knows. God knows everything. The boy? He is much more than Mafia; he, and his, own the country.

His militias will fight to the death if for no other reason than if hes overthrown they will be killed, too. Iraq, you remember Iraq, dont you? she shouts, a refugee. Her English is good. Reached via Skype, she speaks anonymously, afraid of repercussions. You wont believe what I have seenher voice lowered, almost a whispera decapitated body with a dogs head sewn on, for example. Yes, I know, its much more complicated than that.