Of Government

Of necessity, the women lie down like maps.

The men are beautiful divisible numbers.

Tragic & insubstantial, he moves on her landscape,

a particular sequence we will call believeable.

So now we are adult. Each of us

is a little mother, rediscovering seriousness:

how around a table the arrangement of dolls

frowned, without breasts, into their tea

one day and refused to speak.

In bed, we are as political as children.

It reaches that far, the idea of government,

controlled movement of traffic & arms.

Then we are masses of emotion

needing direction to be trusted?

The marriage directive is: Adjust.

The movement of men over women is friendly

and, for a moment, light, then stalls.

Then slides away, like a land mass

into the sea.

The directive of government

is: Diplomacy. Like courtship,

it fears and displays the erotic;

like marriage, it cultivates the bored.

Boredom, the single indignity worth repetition.

Some indifferences take care of us,

but eventually each is an angry father:

the artist's scorn for his audience;

hatred of the child for the parent

who, by love, permits no escape.

Failing at love, we find it was not important.

Better to be honest than to be human,

though both are contained in a pure, relentless anger:

hatred of opposites, of sex, of directives,

hatred of ourselves, and boredom with that hate.

So we move toward heaven, man and wife

and nation, not hoping to find it,

but by some violences done to ourselves

(by marriage, by government) to reveal ourselves.

Lacking belief, we are the dolls we once kept.

One day they would not be arranged

but stared into our government (which was,

we then believed, of love), were undeceived,

and trusted, at last, the richness of the world.