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with gratitude to Karen Garthe, poet,
and to Ryszard Kapuscinski,
who loved to stand in empty palaces
and led me to the poem’s title
You can write poems about your
divorces, your mortgages, your
writing students. I won’t forgive
the Bushes’ phony wars:
half a million infidels encamped,
drinking near abstemious
Mecca, Medina, Islam’s holiest
sites, to slay myriad Muslims,
Bush the First skipping up
dyslection airplane boarding
stairs, sending infuriated believers
into truck-bombing 1993
World Trade Center, thence 9/
11, thence second Bush’s second
phony war slaughtering
hundreds of thousands more
flesh-and-blood Muslims,
destroying our cradle of civilization,
endlessly rocketed. “How beautiful
our world/so long
ago,” wrote my mother (1902
to 1983), Thelma Evelyn,
a Republican, alas, as was her mother,
Alice Pauline, who however liked
President Kennedy, I am happy to say.
He scribbled a list of
what nexts and circled “poverty”.
RFK found it after the assassination.
Bobby knew what
it was like to be everyone, to be,
say, a very old woman. Black Jesus
followed him, protecting
him only in LA streets, alas.
The women of the First Mother!
The spotlight from
the last performance of The Red
Shoes, first movie I saw,
at age five, with Mother, immortal
Moira Shearer as Victoria
Page, her red hair leading
us into the spotlight, absence
triumphing over presence, and I
accept the red shoes from
shoemaker Léonide Massine
as the candle slowly
flickers out to “FIN”:
the mortal flame: my thoughts
fly like Vicky in her red shoes!
Do not want to say goodbye
to the world! “Tomorrow is
my 72nd birthday,” I say to
Diego López Rivera. “I need
twenty more years to finish
my work. I want to see your
grandfather’s mural Man at
the Crossroads returned to
Rockefeller Center.” Must finish my
poem-opera Humanity at the Crossroads
and twenty-five other works in progress.
Apartment 8D: my home since 1988.
Exiting the elevator you
face 8A: in the 1930s and 40s
lived there Martha Graham
and Louis Horst, making love
and modern dance, two rooms
and a piano. When I was twenty-
one, Morse Peckham named
Graham, Frank Lloyd Wright,
and Charles Ives the three
greatest US artists. Across the
street from where we live now
and where Martha lived
Ives lived with wife, Harmony,
from 1908 to 1911 writing music
I use in my poets’ opera
The Death of the Forest. My dance
with drawings, The Re-Creation
of the New World, to Messiaen’s
Twenty Ways of Looking at
Baby Jesus, begins with the women
of the First Mother filling
the stage. Martha is the First
Mother as is Thelma Evelyn,
as is Lucy Dinknesh, who lived
three million years ago.
Lucy’s offspring number twenty
trillion now all of us here
and now and all who came
before, so: ten trillion women
fill the stage in the first
and last of twenty scenes of
The Re-Creation of the New World.
They are the women of the First Mother.
On the wall as I write this:
Frank Lloyd Wright’s drawing
“Crescent Opera, Civic Auditorium/
Plan for Greater Baghdad 1957”
in the cradle of civilization
looking like it is on Mars,
where Karl Kraus wanted his
play The Last Days of Mankind
performed. The Death of
the Forest moment, long ago
cut, when two teenage boys,
Wampanoag native and English
settler, exchange clothes. But
(not cut) the Wampanoag is caught
and sold into slavery in the Indies
in 1676. His offspring to
today, sixteen generations, fill
the stage to end the opera.
He is Hero Futura. “Let me
tell you a story,” Hero Futura says.
“I was sixteen, in Puerto Rico.
Some other boys and I were
playing in the river, in Puerto
Rico. We were swimming.
Naked. We saw some men come
up on horses, and they tied the
horses by the river and went
up to the factory. There were
enough horses for all of us
boys, so we got on them, naked,
and we rode through the foam
of the river, the wind ... refreshing.
Naked. My body holding the horse’s
body.” Hero Futura laughs,
and in his laughter can be heard
all his laughs (and many of
his groans and tears) laughed
in all his twenty years back past
an infant splashing in sunny
cool water with a dozen other kids.
New Year’s Eve 1984.
It is snowing. Hero Futura kneels naked
at his window facing
Cooper Union on Astro Place
and gazes up into the vast night sky.
He says:
“It is snowing
[pauses]
Astro Place
[pauses]
The East Village
[pauses]
The West Village
[pauses]
Manhattan
[pauses]
New York City
[pauses]
The United States
[pauses]
North America
[pauses]
The New World
[pauses]
The World
[pauses]
It is snowing.”
He looks into the deep clear
sky at a bright star.
He writes and says,
as though he has absorbed
the power of these places
and infinite space:
“Astro Place [pauses]
The universe
(like a chant)
Astro Place
The universe
Astro Place
The universe”
Planning for performances
of The Last Days of Mankind at
Baghdad Crescent Opera on Mars!
One more tale tonight: I was
twelve: our teacher, Saint
Ralph Joseph, introduced us to
the cradle of civilization, to
cuneiform, to “audio-visual.”
I thought up A History of
Dance, from Neanderthals to
Egyptian to Greek and Roman
to waltz to Can-Can to Charleston
to Jitterbug, which Mr. Joseph
let me produce and choreograph
to set my classmates thinking.
Then I began writing A History
of the World, of which, sixty-eight
years later, dear reader, this
is the newest installment.
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