John Balaban

At dusk, by the irrigation ditch
gurgling past backyards near the highway,
locusts raise a maze of calls in cottonwoods.
...

The stream runs clear to its stones;
the fish swim in sharp outline.
Girl, turn your face for me to draw.
Tomorrow, if we should drift apart,
...

Two swallows fly in a broken window, sweeping under
yellow orchids tumbling from the rotted frame.

The ghost up there has stopped her complaining
while out in the rain below a tarp, a girl selling soup
...

After most of the bodies were hauled away
and while the FBI and Fire Department and NYPD
were still haggling about who was in charge, as smoke cleared,
the figures in Tyvek suits came, gloved, gowned, masked,
...

Hadn't seen Eddie for some time,
wheeling his chair through traffic,
skinny legs in shorts, T-shirted,
...

After our war, the dismembered bits
- all those pierced eyes, ear slivers, jaw splinters,
gouged lips, odd tibias, skin flaps, and toes -
...

Hazed with harvest dust and heat
the air swam with flying husks
as men whacked rice sheaves into bins
and all across the sunstruck fields
...

At dusk, by the irrigation ditch
gurgling past backyards near the highway,
locusts raise a maze of calls in cottonwoods.

A Spanish girl in a white party dress
strolls the levee by the muddy water
where her small sister plunks in stones.

Beyond a low adobe wall and a wrecked car
men are pitching horseshoes in a dusty lot.
Someone shouts as he clangs in a ringer.

Big winds buffet in ahead of a storm,
rocking the immense trees and whipping up
clouds of dust, wild leaves, and cottonwool.

In the moment when the locusts pause and the girl
presses her up-fluttering dress to her bony knees
you can hear a banjo, guitar, and fiddle

playing "The Mississippi Sawyer" inside a shack.
Moments like that, you can love this country.
...

Hadn't seen Eddie for some time,
wheeling his chair through traffic,
skinny legs in shorts, T-shirted,
down at the corner off Dixie Highway,
lifting his Coke cup to the drivers
backed up, bumper to bumper, at the light.
Sometimes he slept on the concrete bench
up from Joe's News. Sometimes police
would haul him in and he said he didn't mind
because he got three squares and sometimes
a doctor would look at his legs, paralyzed,
he said, since the cop in New York shot him
when he tried to steal a car. Sad story,
of the kind we've learned to live with.

One rainy day he looked so bad, legs
ballooned, ankles to calves, clothes soaked,
I shoved a $20 in his cup. But, like I said,
I hadn't seen him around so yesterday
I stopped and asked this other panhandler,
Where's Eddie? "Dead,' he said. Slammed
by a truck running the light, crushed
into his wheelchair. Dead, months ago.

My wife says he's better off dead,
but I don't know. Behind his smudged glasses
his eyes were clever. He had a goofy smile
but his patter was sharp. His legs were a mess
and he had to be lonely. But spending days
in the bright fanfare of traffic and
those nights on his bench, with the moon
huge in the palm trees, the highway quiet,
some good dreams must have come to him.
...

The stream runs clear to its stones;
the fish swim in sharp outline.
Girl, turn your face for me to draw.
Tomorrow, if we should drift apart,
I shall find you by this picture.
...

Two swallows fly in a broken window, sweeping under
yellow orchids tumbling from the rotted frame.

The ghost up there has stopped her complaining
while out in the rain below a tarp, a girl selling soup

squats by the curb slicing tiny hoops of chili,
piling little heaps of red on a white dish.

Did the ghost upstairs learn English or French?
Where did she intend to go? Why does she linger?

How her lips must burn when her fingers brush them.
One swallow darts out the darkened window

while over in L.A., stuck in traffic, some Vietnamese guy
remembers this street, the vendor, the house lying almost empty.Two swallows fly in a broken window, sweeping under
yellow orchids tumbling from the rotted frame.

The ghost up there has stopped her complaining
while out in the rain below a tarp, a girl selling soup

squats by the curb slicing tiny hoops of chili,
piling little heaps of red on a white dish.

Did the ghost upstairs learn English or French?
Where did she intend to go? Why does she linger?

How her lips must burn when her fingers brush them.
One swallow darts out the darkened window

while over in L.A., stuck in traffic, some Vietnamese guy
remembers this street, the vendor, the house lying almost empty.
...

After most of the bodies were hauled away
and while the FBI and Fire Department and NYPD
were still haggling about who was in charge, as smoke cleared,
the figures in Tyvek suits came, gloved, gowned, masked,
ghostly figures searching rubble for pieces of people,
bagging, then sending the separate and commingled remains
to the temporary morgue set up on site.
This is where the snip of forefinger began its journey.

Not alone, of course, but with thousands of other bits not lost
or barged off with the tonnage for sorting at the city landfill.
A delicate tip, burnt and marked ‘finger, distal' and sent over
to the Medical Examiner's, where forensic anthropologists
sorted human from animal bones from Trade Center restaurants,
all buried together in the Pompeian effect of incinerated dust.

The bit of finger (that might have once tapped text messages,
potted a geranium, held a glass, stroked a cat, a lover's face,
tugged a kite string along a beach) went to the Bio Lab
where it was profiled, bar-coded, and shelved in a Falcon tube.
Memorial Park, that is to say: the parking lot behind the ME,
droned with generators for the dozens of refrigerated trucks
filling with human debris, while over on the Hudson at Pier 94
families brought toothbrushes or lined up for DNA swabbing.

As the year passed, the unidentified remains were dried out
in a desiccation room - humidity pumped out, heat raised high -
shriveled, then vacuumed sealed.
But the finger tip had
a DNA match in a swab from her brother. She was English.
30 years old. She worked on the 105th floor of the North Tower.
The Times ran a bio. Her friends posted blogs. Her father
will not speak about it. Her mother planted a garden in Manhattan.
In that garden is a tree. Some look on it and feel restored.
Others, when the wind lifts its leaves, want to scream.
...

At dusk, by the irrigation ditch gurgling past backyards near the highway, locusts raise a maze of calls in cottonwoods.

A Spanish girl in a white party dress strolls the levee by the muddy water where her small sister plunks in stones.

Beyond a low adobe wall and a wrecked car men are pitching horseshoes in a dusty lot. Someone shouts as he clangs in a ringer.

Big winds buffet in ahead of a storm, rocking the immense trees and whipping up clouds of dust, wild leaves, and cottonwool.

In the moment when the locusts pause and the girl presses her up-fluttering dress to her bony knees you can hear a banjo, guitar, and fiddle

playing 'The Mississippi Sawyer' inside a shack. Moments like that, you can love this country.
...

'Each structure, in its beauty, was even then and at once antique, but in the freshness of
its vigor, even today, recent and newly wrought. - Plutarch, on the Acropolis


In old town Athens of date palms, of ferned balconies
cascading canary calls, I walked with a Bulgarian friend
up the stony, sunny path to the 'high city' where tangles
of cactus and spanish sword pocked the Periclean ramparts
and packs of wild cats prowled the brush for mice as wind
whipped the naps of their fur and Georgi's little son, Aleko,
hooted after them as we trailed behind, plodding upwards
through the gate of broken columns to the precincts of Athena,
two poets, from West and East, here for the first time, awed
by the lonely grace of stones fallen, stones still standing.

*

On the left, the smiling maidens of the karyatid porch
whose marble robes fluttered in blue sky;
on the right, the massive surge of Parthenon columns
capped by a parade of centaurs, horsemen, gods,
reliving dramas of who we are, who we might become
as pediments marked our battles with beasts, our talks
with gods, our search for ourselves in philosopher groves
of this city on the hill that draws us by surviving
Persian navies, Roman consuls, pasha's yoke, Panzergruppe
- holding up like a Phidean model a sense
of the examined life that is worth living, a place
where gods and men can struggle with success, striving
to widen the wealth of the human soul, the size of heaven.
All across the monumental rubble, trailing after tour guides,
Japanese photographed this field of broken stone.

*

As we looked out from the Acropolis, we saw
the New World Order the President praised
that winter as caged canaries down below
sang in the sunshine of Athenian balconies:
Both superpowers, bankrupt; the Japanese, our bankers.
Looking east past Yugoslavian slaughter,
the Kozlodui reactor was about to blow.
Further east, in Tbilisi, the shoot-out at Parliament,
the breadlines in Moscow, the dead rivers and lakes,
the black colonels hopping in Rumpelstilskin rage
at loss of empire, as Chechens, Kurds, Azeris et al.
went for their guns to settle old scores.
How much has changed since then?
Merely the killing fields.
*

Then it was Israeli rubber bullets and intifada stones.
Holiday shoppers at Clapham Junction bombed by Irish Santas.
German skinheads bashing Vietnamese and Turks.
Bloated African bellies, fly-infested eyes.
Shining Path Maoists beheading Indians in Ayacucho.
And nosferatu warlords in Beijing sipping their elixir
of cinnabar and blood. Pol Pot vacationing in Thailand.
*

Meanwhile, it was snowing in Chicago, snowing on the cardboard huts
of the homeless in the land of the free, as more banks failed
and repossessed midwestern farms lay fallow to the wind.
Each in the cell of himself was almost convinced of his freedom
when the Wall fell to cheers of freed multitudes
and one could hear communist and capitalist gasps rise up
in a global shout which circled the earth for a year
then disappeared through holes in the ozone layer.

*

The New World Order. The tribes of the Book
are still turned to wrath as the worst of us
would wind time back to savage pasts easier to imagine.
The philosopher's grove is empty; the poet's words gone flat.
Against this, aren't the Japanese, baptized in nuclear fire,
clapping their hands for the Kami of the cash register,
our safest, sanest neighbors?
*

These old stones cry out for more. Surviving centuries, sculpted for all to see, declaring our need for beauty and laws like love for this tiny polis of a planet spinning wildly, for my daughter, snug, asleep in her bed, for Aleko who played in the Chernobyl cloud, whose father stood near Nike's rotting frieze, looking out upon the city jammed with cars. Georgi opened his flask of vodka and poured some on a stone before we drank our toasts to the new world order and to whatever muse might come to give us words.
...

Their cottage sat on a grassy bluff weathered by salt spray, fogs, and rain blowing off dunes and bleached logpiles past tidal creeks seeping out to sea.

Cattails bobbed with red-wing blackbirds. Sparrows clamored through wild-rose thickets. Two dogs, spattered with sandy muck, snoozed on the sunny porch steps.

Dinner simmered on the stove. Pulling weeds in the garden, she smiled, hearing his tires pop gravel and clamshells at their rutted lane's long winding end.

The dogs leapt up, loped out to greet him. This is how it should have been
...

Their cottage sat on a grassy bluff weathered by salt spray, fogs, and rain blowing off dunes and bleached logpiles past tidal creeks seeping out to sea.

Cattails bobbed with red-wing blackbirds. Sparrows clamored through wild-rose thickets. Two dogs, spattered with sandy muck, snoozed on the sunny porch steps.

Dinner simmered on the stove. Pulling weeds in the garden, she smiled, hearing his tires pop gravel and clamshells at their rutted lane's long winding end.

The dogs leapt up, loped out to greet him. This is how it should have been
...

Yellow alfalfa banks the rutted lane that winds in under the bedstead gate latched with loops of baling wire.

Horseskulls bleach on fenceposts running down through sagebrush to the cabin snug by the sandy creek.

Pieces of plows hang from the cedars along with barn hinges, tractor chains, and a rusted-out kettle. A buffalo hide

drapes a lodge pole wedged in willows. The cabin's covered in sweetpea vines, blossoms tumbling out bees.

Eliseo has set his cot outside near an iron pot brimming peonies. Lying alone at night, watching stars shake, hearing the creek talk, he remembers before there was a camp

and his father would come here to watch thunderheads collapse on the prairie and drag sweeps of rain across arroyos.

Worried about the old man sleeping on the ground he sawed planks and hauled them up by buckboard rocking to the meadow on wheels that smelled of sage. Now old himself he comes to his cabin to heat chili and bread on the wood stove to sleep by the creek or sit by a spruce whittling birds for grandchildren.

In the dark, he hears his ponies graze across the fern-crowded creek where fireflies flare like memories and his father and grandchildren's voices rise from the cold traveling water.
...

After most of the bodies were hauled away and while the FBI and Fire Department and Transportation Safety were still haggling about who was in charge, as smoke cleared, the figures in Tyvek suits came, gloved, gowned, masked, white ghostly figures searching rubble for pieces of people, then sending the separate and commingled remains to the autopsy-and-mortuary set up on site. This is where the snip of forefinger began its journey.

Not alone, of course, but with thousands of other bits not lost or dumped at the city landfill or in the tonnage barged out to sea. A delicate tip, burnt, bagged and marked "finger, distal" and sent on to the Bio Lab, bar-coded, then on to Bone and Tissue where forensic anthropologists sorted human from animal bones from the Trade Center restaurants, all buried together in the Pompeian effect of incinerated, compacted dust.

The bit of finger (that might have once tapped text messages, potted a geranium, held a glass, stroked a cat, a lover's face, tugged a kite string along a beach) went to the Medical Examiner's where it was profiled, re-coded, and shelved in a Falcon tube in Memorial Park, that is to say: the parking lot behind the ME droning with generators for the dozens of refrigerated trucks filling with human debris, while over on the Hudson at Pier 94 families brought toothbrushes or lined up for DNA swabbing.

As the weeks passed, the unclaimed remains were dried out in a desiccation room- humidity pumped out, heat raised high- shriveled, then vacuumed sealed. But the finger tip found a DNA match in a swab from her brother. She was English. 30 years old. She worked on the 105th floor of the North Tower. The Times ran a bio. Her friends posted blogs. Her father will not speak about it. Her mother planted a garden in Manhattan. In that garden is a tree. Some look on it and feel restored. Others, when the wind lifts its leaves, want to scream.
...

Well, her book, anyway. The Kunitz volume left lying on a bench, the pages a bit puffy by morning, flushed with dew, riffled by sea breeze, scratchy with sand - the paperback with the 1930's photo with her in spangled caftan, the back cover calling her 'star of the St. Petersburg circle of Pasternak, Mandelstam, and Blok, surviving the Revolution and two World Wars.'

So she'd been through worse... the months outside Lefortovo prison waiting for a son who was already dead, watching women stagger and reel with news of executions, one mother asking, 'Can you write about this?' Akhmatova thought, then answered, 'Yes.'

If music lured her off the sandy bench to the clubs where men were kissing that wouldn't have bothered her much nor the vamps sashaying in leather. Decadence amid art deco fit nicely with her black dress, chopped hair, Chanel cap. What killed her was the talk, the empty eyes, which made her long for the one person in ten thousand who could say her name in Russian, who could take her home, giving her a place between Auden and Apollinaire to whom she could describe her night's excursion amid the loud hilarities, the trivial hungers at the end of the American century.
...