Flag Day in Vicksburg Mississippi

The “thing-in-itself” (which would be, precisely, pure truth, truth without consequences) is impossible even for the creator of language to grasp, and indeed this is not at all desirable.         Friedrich Nietzsche

Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.         Frank O’Hara

Here I am on a southern sidewalk

Standing at a lamppost and holding an umbrella

Thinking about the words of Frank O’Hara

And of you again

Distant as drizzle over the Pacific

Near as night mist rising from the Mississippi

Fog pooling in low fields and lapping at the hills

I remember you

Wore a dress of Turkish cloth

And a tunic edged with fine gold braid

You were laughing and laughing

Blue eyes white teeth very red lips

A face with the colors of America

I am writing a poem

Not about a flag

Nor about a song about a flag

I am writing a poem

About mystery flowering into any ear that listens

Things blooming in strange domains of language

O lovely stranger

I’m writing a poem

About us

Our story’s noble as a tattered flag

I remember the light of your metropolis

Was a little bored and disgusted

Like the landscape’s hard beige hills

Light lost in the alleys of your yellow city

Light that wanted to be near us

Now that I’m back in Vicksburg and can think

The night grass is gray when street lights come on

Here where fortuity blesses our difference

Here where to be not what one seems

But what one quixotically becomes

Here where Heal-All and Prairie Phlox bloomed

On Independence Day 1863

When Pemberton surrendered his sword to Grant

Flowers that gave the lie to a fallen city

And gave the lie to ironic guns and the sorry rig of 
     refugees

That gave the lie to twenty-thousand killed and 
     wounded soldiers

Remember how your poetry teacher

Made you believe in never getting bluer

Or greener or purpler and never going on and on

Like nightfulness like the dark?

She believed in the rules of poetry

An elaborate but fake symmetrical order

Like the old courthouse in Vicksburg

With its big portico and inflated columns

Yet with the real work done in back rooms

Where in the decades after Reconstruction

White landowners contrived to disenfranchise

Generations of black Americans

Many decades passed before the town

Officially celebrated the Fourth of July

You live in a place with no memory of an enemy’s boot

Is that why ennui haunts your city’s light?

I remember the cadence of your steps up a blind 
     staircase

Ending at a door that might have opened on the void

Maybe you were reading too much

French poetry

Words you still feel but can’t remember

And may never see again

Like phantom limbs

We have dreamt a space within us

Dark and small enough for infinite silence

You’re so beautiful

Who would ever dare to love you?