American "Memorial Day": May 2007

On Memorial Day, I sat on a veranda, above Oike Street, to take my pint of ale in the dusk, reading about American politics. The center doesn't hold there anymore, as an Irish poet once put it when the center didn’t hold where he was. “The best lack all conviction,” he said, “the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Only it is Babylon my countrymen are slouching towards & away from now, Mr. Yeats, not Bethlehem. We will see what new fear that brings on. “Patria mia,” is it really, Ezra Pound? “My country”? You were in London when you penned that title in Italian for an expat essay, exporting to Chicago bits of poetry cribbed from China by other hands than yours in Japan when you were just a whelp in "free-silverite" Idaho. “My country”: Well, yes and no, as we Americans say.

The ale goes down too well,
Better, even, than the dusk of May:
Another year gone slack, a loosening of the belt.

Then the friend I was waiting for arrived, and it was off with us up Kiyamachi, forty-odd meters: three glasses of house red & some good talk.






Oike-dori,
by night.