The Exodus

(fragments from an ancient manuscript)

[This was, strangely enough, my first published poem, back in 1990; at the time it was an obvious response to the disintegration of arts funding under the Reagan and Bush administrations, and the trials of artists who were regarded as inappropriately shocking to be funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (especially Tim Miller, whom I knew at the time, and Holly Hughes, who remains one of my favorite performance artists to this day). Of course, the genre and structure are the strange bits. Even writing an extended epic – with sci-fi surrealism, an illusion of fragmentation, and a steady, square, pseudo-Eddic meter – was peculiar enough; the fact that I wrote and published it in Los Angeles, where poetry is dominated by image, personal story, and alternative identities, was even more bizarre. I remain proud of it, though. This is a shorter version, about two-thirds as long as the original, which moves a bit faster and deletes some of the more peculiarly conflicted lines....]

from III. The collapse

... until the dark hand fell,
and the Endowment was no more.

And in the months to follow, when
the Art Laws first prohibited
all images and words that seemed
subversive or obscene, before
the first Secession of the West,
before the MOMA Massacre,
they heard the fear in lyrics, saw
the hints to flee encoded in
small gallery exhibits. They
began to fondle airline schedules,
barter brushes, typewriters,
connive for private grants, beg for
inflated dollars to escape
the ties that held them to the place
that once was called the land of freedom...

VII. The flight

The exodus began: the painters
(trunks of leaking tubes, hair tangled)
flew to Roman villas, Bauhaus
spaces in Berlin...

The novelists defected too,
since it was clear that angry letters
merely caused arrests at three
a.m., and empty, bloody beds.
The poets did not leave until
the third Secession, and the first
of several civil wars. By then
they noticed all was not all right;
they dashed to rickety last planes,
too flimsy to be commandeered
by warring military camps
for strafing runs and bombing of
disruptive types, the poor, and others
whose allegiance was unsure.

They were almost too late, because
at last the axe fell. We all still
remember tales of crippled dancers,
blood and paint enmixed, brave mothers
hiding teenaged poets, and
the film directors who refused
to leave director’s chairs until
machine gun bullets tore the fabric...

XII. The last wave

The artists who had not escaped,
the ones remaining who had thought
that martial law was temporary,
those who tried to play the game,
and those who hadn’t quite believed
the newscasts, hid in unmarked vans,
dashed towards borders driving borrowed
cars without a license, dodging
armored tanks and barricades.

These desperadoes gathered in
the airports and train stations, foul
bus depots and freight-crowded docks
(some fell into the wine-dark sea)
and fled, their faces turned to watch
behind them, hoping not to feel
the black guns’ tearing fire just
before the closing of the doors.

They crossed the borders step by step,
miles won toward safer lands, and miles
away from home. They offered prayers,
original in style, to all
the muses and the rebel arts,
in hope of reaching safety...

from XIII. The empty trap

... And in the space they left behind,
life gradually collapsed to two
dimensions: distance, and expense,
and all was measured by those rules.

(Black uniforms, dark limousines,
assassinations, murders, the
explosive reds of gunfire, and
the brighter reds of terrorism -
striking subjects for the painters,
but the artists all had gone.)

Some journalists and actors stayed
sequestered by the government;
they could not guess their futures, and
perhaps that was more merciful.
In any case, the veil is drawn
on civil wars, the battles of
succession, and three hundred years
of the American Dark Age.
We sing the wanderers, the fleeing
artists, and their transformations.

In far lands, artists found their ways,
bizarre and separate, inventing
gorgeous memories, forgetting
bloody turmoil to recall
a golden, grand America,
a vision made to order from
pre-revolutionary views...

from XXI. The new view

Those who settled tropic islands
saw their arts grow gentler and
more sensual. Tahitian poets
reinvented enchained sonnets,
cheerfully creating without
ego’s signatures, in groups
that gathered around huge bonfires
on white beaches...

Slow, bright musics made with flutes
and electronics in New Zealand,
silver orchestras of gongs
and new steel instruments in Guam
played through long, warm nights in constant
rhythms. Singers moved in boats
across the ocean, scarves protecting
throats that glittered with the jewelry
of a hundred islands, warming
up to sing recitals under
palms, near dead volcano’s rims.

The painters of Antarctica
began an art of subtle whites;
they forged more than a hundred words
for delicate degrees of difference
in the empty canvas, seeking
distant memories of faces
that had vanished in the snow.

And we know their colleagues, the
Saharan desert painters, blending
waves of sandy hues, the sculptors
working with the winds to make
the dunes across vast distances
change shape. The desert-bound musicians
learned the ecstasy of numbers,
let their sounds evaporate
into a silence full of meaning,
hearing glory in the winds
and empty skies. No vacuum, though,
can last forever, and the poets
of their tribes began to chant
their lyrics, making songs that rang
across the world, long, fluid lines
of notes and words that taught the beauty
of the sands to greener countries...

from XXIX. The Return

In later centuries, when the
cruel Baptist-Islam wars were over,
when the long-lost artists came
again to colonize the land,
and when they rebuilt New New York
on a much grander scale, with golden
buildings, crystal domes in clear
blue air, some ancient images
by Mapplethorpe were etched in alloys
all around the city walls.

Children in small boats, who watched
the sun set on the bay, would argue
for their favorites: naked flowers,
men’s dark torsos, and the perfect
faces of long-vanished women....

[Los Angeles, 5/19/90-12/6/91]