WHO PROMISED YOU TOMORROW?

It’s time you paganized yourself

and left all sublimations

to the dry of soul.

It’s time

you learned that ears can taste,

and eyes remember, and the tongue

and nostrils see like fingertips

in any dark.

Think back

or look around, and all you know

is what your body taught you:

lake smoke in the Adirondacks,

the razor’s flame across

your lathered cheek, language

that changed to silence or to tears

when there was nothing more

to say…

Right here in Cannes

on the Fourth of July, you watch

a cornucopia a-swelter in the sun.

A Saudi wife, enrobed

and cowled like a nun, passes

a Cannaise in her isosceles

and thong.

They stand there

like opposed philosophies of women,

history, desire, God,

and everything you think about

too much…

The stationed candles

on the altar of Notre Dame

de Bon Voyage diminish

like your future.

Anchored

in the bay, the S. S. Ticonderoga

claims the future’s now.

Housing a zillion dollars’

worth of hardware in her hull,

she’s programmed for the war

that no one wants.

She bristles

like a ploughshare honed into a sword-

the ultra-weapon from the ultra-tool.

Basking in the hull of yourself

against the worst, you contemplate

the carefully united states

you call your body.

Concealed

or bared, it houses who you are,

and who you are is why you live,

and why you live is worth

the life it takes to wonder how.

Your body’s not concerned.

It answers

what it needs with breath, sleep,

love, sweat, roses,

children, and a minimum of thought.

It says all wars are waged

by puritans, and that the war

nobody wants is history’s excuse

for every war that ever happened….

The gray Ticonderoga fires

a salute of twenty guns

plus one for independence

and the men who died to earn it.

Each shot reminds you of the killed

Americans still left in France.

Before they left their bodies,

did they think of war or what

their bodies loved and missed

the most: a swim at noon,

the night they kissed a woman

on her mouth, the times they waited

for the wind to rise like music,

or the simple freedom of a walk,

a waltz, a trip?

Under

the sun of Cannes, you hum

your mind to sleep.

You tell

yourself that time is one

day long or one long day

with pauses for the moon and stars,

and that tomorrow’s sun is yesterday’s

today.

Your body answers

that it knows, it’s known

for years, it’s always known.

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