Roger Mitchell

Boston Common

“Boston had solved

the universe,” wrote Adams (Henry), but for that

tiny blemish, slavery. Teutonic

objectivity, Yankee reticence, and Mount

Vernon Street’s close

proximity to its own ideas

relieved Henry, not just of deity and doubt, but,

too, the word, “I,”

so troublesome, invasive, slippery, open

to all sorts of tendentious distortion

(longings masked as polity; enslavements, freedoms;

confinements, rights),

I barely breathes in uttering the like.

*** 

  

1975

It was the fall I sat in the small monastic room

in Charlbury

with the signed picture of Allen Dulles above

the desk watching me write, among others,

the poem about Allende’s widow

on the second

anniversary of his overthrow,

wondering what the Hungarian emigre whose

name I’ve suppressed

did besides profess history at Illinois

and what he had done in the past to earn

the gratitude and the glossy photograph

of the CIA’s

avuncular, pipe-smoking director,

and in a small Oxfordshire village a split-level

and completely

detached house which he rented to American

and other academics along with

a car and a sturdy, plain assortment of plates

and furniture,

the kind that over time would never break.

Weekly rap sessions with the Oxford Marxists kept me

underlining

passages in Althusser, Macherey. Here was

an understanding of the world the world

no longer wanted, one that would increasingly

retreat from life,

and as it did so, make increasing sense.

Large forms loom against the sky. The bit of history

I know slips off

into one of time’s damp cul-de-sacs. In its place,

a misbegotten rage. The enemy

is everywhere, next door, in the air we breathe, the

way we breathe it,

smiles on our faces, hope’s ghost in our hearts.

***

“Set Me Where You Stand”

It was an all-English morning this morning, just off

Beachy Head, down

the coast from Dover. A kestrel and a skylark

both obliged by helicoptering straight

above us. The sun shone chalky white on the clean

cut cliffs, off which

Gloucester thought he’d pitched himself in Lear. Now

so popular a spot to throw your worries to the wind,

they put a phone

right at the top of the down’s last lift. It claps air

at three hundred feet or more from where,

if you leapt, you’d make a heap of clabbered ham on

the rocks. “Hello.

           This is me calling. Is anybody there?”

***

***