Roosevelt Island Tram

How could I not have known
about this path through the sky
for the price of a coffee?

Do I – does anyone – deserve
this calm climb, this splendid view
of the clogged bridge

and its humbled arches? Below,
the river rushes into the state,
brown as the subway.

I can’t feel the wind,
and, like everywhere, people
stand around me.

A few are family.
The island I’m going to?
Just another set of city blocks.

Drawing closer, then the swift
drop, the faces looking up
at me, but not at me.

The glass between makes it futile
to shout my joy at what
I’ve seen and done. When it’s over –

too soon! – I am let down,
and wander with the crowd
out the open doors and past

the field where men play soccer.
I’m back in the traffic with the pigeons.
And then I see the ferry.

Somewhere Outside Peking

I was in bad shape. I could hardly cry.
I was probably a girl. I was probably
missing a limb, or a lung. To be honest,

lying in that alley, I was fine calling it quits.
But the missionaries, who kept track
of village pregnancies, found me.

They brought me to the monastery
and rushed through my baptism
before my final breath.

The water was a new sensation.
It made me want to live.
But then I died. I was dead.

And buried in the small Christian graveyard.
You know when you think a story’s over,
and though it wasn’t good, at least it’s over?

When the villagers dug me up, and beat
two of the priests to death,
I wasn’t grateful for their companionship.

They just buried me again in their graveyard.
Their silence, as they flung dirt on me,
felt like it meant something.

The priests had nothing to say to me,
even though we had death in common,
and though I hadn’t been around long,

I could see things were just going to get uglier.
I would have been happy with two arms
and a heart that worked. A chance at life.

Despite it all, though, there was this:
When the church windows’ colored light
touched my eyes before I succumbed,

it wasn’t like a god exactly, but it gave me
a moment of wonder, which I guess
could be called happiness.

Notes on Revolution

I asked if he’d rather blow up institutions
or build them. He said:
I’d rather work inside institutions
to make them crumble.

*

Stay in your lane, they say.
But what if I’m on foot –
what if I just want to get across
the goddamned street?

*

I don’t know if God loves me,
but Whitman does.

*

Sometimes I worry that
the self isn’t that important,
and that doubt, self-questioning,
is all solipsistic,
and there are some injustices
I could help right…
then I wake in the morning
and pick up the sprung mousetrap
in the corner of the kitchen,
the small dead creature
with its neck snapped,
its black eye swollen to bursting,
the chip of peanut it never tasted…
and I get a plastic bag –
something I should be recycling –
drop the corpse inside, trap, peanut and all,
and toss it in the garbage.

*

Explain this: most people I agree with
about politics annoy me.

*

Richard Wright believed
the Communist Revolution was inevitable
and good, glorious even,
and he saw no place for his doubting self
in that world to come.