A short word and a poem for my daughter at day's end

“The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another… We are the State and we shall continue to be the State until we have created the institutions that form a real community.” Gustav Landauer

The writings this morning were full of people congratulating themselves on their own wisdom. So many clever ways you can sing I-told-you-sos or give sure-footed lectures on hydraulics to the flooded. Not every lesson was without merit. Or fairness. But nothing I came across acknowledged that there might be a strength in many of those who simply went to work with the thread they were given to raise the best flag they could muster in the ruin of a republic that never-was. True, the work doesn’t leave you with as clean of hands but the flexing of the imagination over the bird in the hand takes as least as much risk as the more prescient work of the wise.

Regardless of whether I am deluded on that count or not, the one thing that is clear is that in a time of wishing upon wells, the sigil chosen was phallic, an exaltation of extraction and an embrace of fear of strangers. Tell me again how the majority simply chose what would make their life more affordable, with no deep resonance for either misogyny or racism. I hear you. I, too, see neighbors among them. And goodness. But the genius of Himmler, according to Arendt, was that he realized that people who had once had security and some semblance of wealth but lost it, would get it line for anything to regain it. Be careful not to confuse understandable with honorable.


Those communities prophecied by Landauer are, I think, like Illich’s kitchen table, the limits of the political at world’s end . Elections, here and now, are maybe more about the habitat in which those small togetherings will have to survive than they are about any lasting shelter in themselves. I don’t know which niche is more likely to hasten the looked-for wonder of an Us that can muster real change, the tempered or the brazen. And I don’t feel a need to praise the devil by promising only doom beneath the sick flag of a fool. But I would have more than welcomed a shift of form, a following of woman for a change. Plus dancing on the grave of makeshift dreams making do with what they find in the wreckage is bad table manners. And these scattered tables are where anything close to the end of such a State as this will be born. Two cents at days end.

Tributary

Child, when the tide is lowest
and the channel exposed,
unlace the strings
and slip your skin.

Let dark feet slip into brack.
Tether round a gull-leg maypole,
running fingers 'cross white belly leaves,
Forage in the hoof print of the sea.

If she is not herself, who will be?

How long since you whispered a story
to the stones?
How long since you danced 
with Them
before your eyes?
When did a Company cease to hold
your heart as home?

If she is herself alone, what is she?

Woman, when the tide returns 
and the channel is submerged,
let fur and eyelet lay
and go walking inland
upright along our line 
to set your broken bones
in partisan woods. 

Sit before the fire of found friends,
luscent in the wantings of the wind,
and set your fingers on the rim.

Let the glass move over letters.
Let the dead say their goodbyes,
petals from your lips upon their song.
Where the the land turns down in shade
bury here the violent ones,
bits of your metal
left with their remains,
companions for soil 
that will redeem their bones;
and then, returning 
to the water, to your skin,
as the burning bow sinks under,
you, restitch the strings.

If not now, when?