CHARLES BERNSTEIN

LONELINESS IN LINDEN

after Wallace Stevens

The fear and the hum are one.
Monuments of show gumming the works
Until the weather grows tired of the people
And the people grow tired of the dance.
Jamais,jamais,jamais,again.
The measure of the town against a dampening sky
Cobbling together six million tunes
Into more than the tones tattoo
Or their scrambled mosaic forecloses.
And if the fume and the hope
Are one? My monkey,from ’49
Steps as silent as those songs
Along the cratered dark
Where Jews do Jewish things
No one pretends to understand
Or are they pilgrims on this night
When the fear and the hum are one?

THE DUCK HUNTERS

for Ernesto Livon-Grosman

“I remember beautiful rivers
but not the boat to take you there.”

The shots ring across Plaza de Mayo
16 June 1955.Even
the duck hunters shudder at blood-splattered
column of Cristoforo Colombo,
rising up upon the shoulders of those
from before.While we are now,or nearly
now.“Those who use violence against their
enemies will,turning,use violence
against themselves,even their own people.”
Dulce de lechebut the memory
slashes.Go back,daylight too hard to bear,
night soaks in despair.No moment exists
save this one,doubling over heave & mar
& spill,in still more furious repair.
Buenos Aires,16 June 2005

On June 16,1955,Argentine navy planes bombed the government and cultural center
of Buenos Aires in an attempt to kill the elected president,Juan Peron.The Pope had
excommunicated Peron on the same day.After 300 unarmed civilians died in the attack,
a crowd torched the nearby Buenos Aires cathedral.The epigraph is from a comment by
María Elena Qués.The quotation adapts a line from Judith Malina’s 1967 translation of
Brecht’s 1948 version of Hölderlin’s 1804 translation of Sophocles’s Antigone.