Identification

And if I rise from beds to walk
on brilliant yellow leaf:
And if the one who huddles in
so timid warm and brief

is the one who found me after all 
and called me into life:
how thank those woolen feet I held
in service to their wife?

But walk a little further 
where the gray clouds shear away, 
and blinding silver pours
out into dawn of day. 
I'd thought of Venus 
and of Vulcan, and of interlocking doors--

but I had thought that Venus
had loaned me to her friend,
to spread her skin with orange oil,
as comfort at the end.

(For even splendid husbands die by afternoon, 
and skin longs for a stroking hand,
and the long dark evening calls 
for cradling when it can.)

No. It it is the little one,
whose candelabra formed 
of pukel men with hollow eyes
was seldom lit or warmed:

She struck the match and named 
me, and I was bound to come:
bound to receive her fingerprints
in the wet clay of my palms.

Tinnitus

Well, it is like someone playing keyboards, 
meditatively, way high on the scale, as high
as the the sound will go. Or like a steampunk
mosquito swaying at my ear. Or like 
a silver brightness, not quite seen.
It is what silence sounds like now:
the goddess of hazards who hums as she works;
or the sift of the sunrise between steel clouds.

A Pledge Of Other Things

Start again: it's the morning walk,

the long slow flourish

of silver in the gray sky, the sudden

slash of rain across my face,

and the leaves scrambling on the street:

if I've forgotten the recklessness that matters

then I've forgotten everything.

Start again.

One painful step, the aching heels,

the flash of pain that runs from hip to calf,

the relief of closing eyes against the light,

so that the pulse knocks once, twice, thrice against the lids.

Start again.

Leave the brutal soldiers to their work,

leave Nineveh its overlaid, perpetual collapse.

Did I think there was no work for me alone to do?

But it's one stone at a time. This word:

its heft in the hand, its longing

for a throat to call its own.

Cup my hands and let them fill with light,

let the radiance dribble down my chin. 

I have forgotten, haven't I? I have.

No matter. Start again.

Straighten up, and the company of ghosts

shuffling at my heels 

falls back and falls behind: they can't keep pace

with standing still.

One prayer learned late or early

will make them flinch; and this light,

this rainwashed silver scarf,

is a pledge of other things

soon to be remembered in their turn.

Not Saying Things: Part Three

Well, sure. Let's talk about plutocracy and corruption, then.

There's such an array of stuff that Clinton is accused of that you can end up a bit dazed. This part is easier if you're old, because the stuff came at you a little at a time, and you knew where it was coming from. I don't even remember what the hell Whitewater was supposed to be about, but I know that I looked at it and thought it completely bogus. Likewise the murder of Vince Foster. In those days Bill Clinton was hugely popular, and attacking his far less popular, unladylike wife looked like a better shot than attacking him directly. They started making crap up to throw at her.

If you want to dive it and relive those wonderful days, be my guest. I'm done. The Clinton enemies have been at this for a very long time.

But there was lots of new stuff to sort through. There was the whatever-it-was she was supposed to have done or left undone in re Benghazi. She was supposedly giving all our uranium away to Russia. She was taking extraordinary amounts in speaker fees from Wall Street.

Michael Arnowitz -- a Portlander, I'm happy to say, though I don't know him -- did a nice takedown of the whole silly speaker fees thing. The guys holding the Benghazi hearings ended up with egg on their face and the question of whatever-it-was is as mysterious as ever. It turns out that, no, Secretary Clinton did not sign away the nation's uranium. What I ran into that was entirely new to me was the Clinton Foundation, presented as a sinister money-laundering operation.

So, the foundation? As it happens, I know a bit about non-profits and how to evaluate them. The Clinton Foundation is a good one, and it spends its money exactly as it says it does. It calls itself a foundation, but it's actually, mostly, a charity: they run their own programs, addressing things such as the availability of drinkable water and HIV medications in Africa. So Pence gets to say the Clinton Foundation takes in all this money and then only spends ten percent in grants. That's true -- because it isn't primarily a grant-funding operation. They do their own stuff, and they do it well and transparently, and they get good ratings from the people who rate charities.

Aha! But people get political favors if they make big donations! Well -- no, they don't. I spent a while chasing this stuff down as well as I could, and I found exactly one iffy-looking nomination to some board after a big donation. It wasn't really a very exciting corruption story. Okay, but -- if you make a big donation you get face time with Clinton, possibly at the State Department, and God knows what goes on in those meetings! No doubt some very sinister favor trading, so cleverly done that no one can detect it.

This is where we're finally getting down to what's real about the trouble with Clinton, and the Democratic Party, and money. Yes. Money gets you access. It generally always has. This is why so many big corporations donate to both parties. When they've got a political issue, they want to make sure they can stroll over and have a little talk about it.

Clinton thinks this is not a problem, because she is not going to offer a quid pro quo. I actually -- laugh at me if you like -- totally believe her about the quid pro quo. I think she's incorruptible. If somebody says, "here's thirty million for your foundation, will you get the State Department to approve our arms deal?" she'll say, "thanks so much! The State Department will approve it or not approve it on its merits!" And they'll go away thinking they've bribed her, and the State Department will approve it or not approve it on its merits, and some people in Africa will get HIV meds.

I have no doubt whatever that one of the benefits that the Clintons anticipated, when they started their foundation, was an extra reason to have face to face time with people in the donor class. Those are people with power, and the Clintons gravitate to power. Always have. They would probably have given these people face time anyway, because they like to keep in touch with powerful people. And *that* is a problem. Just that these are the people that Clinton sees, week in and week out. The people she talks with. The people she's tuned to.

It is not, however, corruption. Clinton is pro-business: she's hardly made a secret of that. She thinks corporation and businesses are the source of American prosperity -- I think that's true myself -- and that therefore they need to be supported and encouraged. As a far-left kind of guy, I think this is a problem. Clinton (and the Democratic party) are just too cozy with these folks. They're biased in favor of business from the git-go.

But being pro-business is not the same thing as being corrupt. It means you lean rightward. It means that you have no particular impulse to become well-versed in environmental issues. It means that you know all about business and corporate concerns about legislation right away, and maybe hear about other concerns later, if at all. It's the perpetual bias of both parties, and will be as long as politics is donation-driven.

Is this plutocracy? Well, yeah, kinda sorta, over the long haul it works out that way. But it's no particular fault of Clinton's, and she's no worse about it than anyone else. It's a systemic problem, and it's not one that Sanders or anyone else was going to fix from the White House. If it's to be fixed, it will fixed legislatively, and state by state -- almost precinct by precinct. It's very, very deeply inwoven in American politics. (And if you think it's worse now than it used to be, you really need to read up on American political history. I particularly recommend the first volume of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson, The Path to Power.)

The most important step at present, in reducing money's sway over politics, is overturning Citizens United, which Clinton is totally and publicly committed to doing -- she's even saying in so many words, if you don't plan to overturn it, don't apply for a Supreme Court nomination. Even if you think Clinton is crooked, I think you can agree it is not her style to renege on something that simply put and forcefully repeated: if she's president, Citizens United goes down.

Not Saying Things: Part Two

I came to have a higher opinion of Bernie Sanders, as I followed him in the primaries. My opinion of both candidates, in fact, was much higher at the end of the primaries than the beginning: I seem to be the only human being in the nation of whom this is true. I liked him. He was civil and respectful throughout the campaign. And of course I agreed in principle with a lot of what he was saying, because I am way off to the left of the American electorate, and he was saying a lot of lefty sorts of things.

In fact, I see that I have to back up a bit to explain my initial bias against him, which may seem a bit mysterious, at this point.

Once upon a time I was an opinionated young man -- even more opinionated than I am now, I mean; a really opinionated young man -- and like many young men I took my opinions very, very seriously. I measured politicians by how much they agreed with me. If you agreed with me about a lot of things, then I thought you were a good politician. If Bernie Sanders had been a national figure at that time I have no doubt he would have been my favorite guy. I was a sucker for third parties, in those days, and I was predisposed to like someone who bucked the parties. "Independent" and "maverick" were words that deeply appealed to me.

Well, time went on, as it does, and my respect for opinions -- mine, everyone's -- dwindled. Everyone's got them, and it doesn't actually matter all that much what they are. When it comes to things actually happening, it's not the politician with the right opinions who matters. It's the politician who can wheedle, threaten, beg, or bargain enough to get other people to go along. And those politicians were the people who took their party machinery seriously, and who worked to get their hands on its levers.

The other thing that became apparent to me, with the passage of time, and the reading of history, was that the two party system was not an accident or a happenstance. There will always be two parties, roughly equal in power, in the United States, apart from re-alignments once or twice a century. It's baked into the Constitution. (That's ironic, because the writers of the Constitution hated parties, and hoped we could have a political life without them; but hey. They were doing this democratic republic thing for the first time. Cut them a little slack.)

So anyway -- whether that's true or not, it was the way I was thinking by the time Sanders came to my attention. "Independent" had lost its charm for me. So had opinionated guys. I cared about legislation, and tax structures, and the composition of the Supreme Court.

Over the course of the primaries, I learned more about Sanders, and though I never learned much respect for his ideas about foreign policy, which were at best sketchy, nor about banking, which I thought were uninformed, I did learn to respect him as a politician. He did lots of progressive networking, and his relationship with the Democratic Party was nuanced and fruitful. He wasn't just exploiting the Democrats by staying outside the party and then running inside it. He was trying to move the party, and he understood how difficult it is to do that from the inside. So I liked him, and I like him still. I hope he's in the Senate another thirty years, and I hope someday we will have made the Democratic Party a place he can call home.

October

A wind from the South, bringing rain.
The wires tremble, trying to remember
the art of winter and the arrangement 
of a thousand glassy silvery eyes: they knew it once
by heart.

My lady of summer glances back, amused,
but she doesn't bother to wave.
She's already thinking of a dalliance 
she might resume where the river Plate
freshens the Atlantic, and little fish
twinkle on crowded decks, 
and the southern lapwing calls.

Here, the ribs of the sky expand,
and every gutter runs
clean but tannin-stained. If I falter,
it is my age: a strong steady hanker
still draws me to the wind.
it is October,
when the greater gods and goddesses arrive.