A shadow of fear hangs over this land 
It is a land of murder! they cry out—the people, the mob
Of mutilations! torments! 
Lovers are drawn and quartered 
 
People, the ordinary ones who live on the streets, 
gather outside the temples, read the news on the billboards, 
are nervous, fearful, they cower 
amid presentiments of catastrophe
Even the bureaucrats are fed up, frightened, and desperate to
go home, lock their office doors behind them,  
and turn off the spigot 
of blood that runs through the capital, the city 
of the "Principessa of Death!"
[Shudders of fear, sung loudly]
 
He's bored. What else is on?
He calls for Conway, or whichever of his stooges 
     hangs outside his door 
to demand that publicly funded TV
screen only biops of famous white males 
who succeed and triumph without a single dime of their 
father's money.
Everything they touch turns to money!
But, holy moly, who are all these people, look at them!
Dirty, ragged clothes, crowds of them—they make me sick...
 
He needs to laugh.
Gimme a show with laughs!
Or at least help him find the porno channel
Now what's that?—That is a "princess"?
Looks like Pelosi's evil twin!
A plague city, that's what this is, with the Chinese sickness! 
 
An evil sickness—fear, horror—infects the soul of the city.
Three questions and one death.
What's this? They're all hanging around waiting for a handout? 
And that old fart led around by the fat chick—? 
What is this place? Fat City? 
The old guy looks like he has the plague already.
Jeezus, twenty minutes in and they're all still posing 
            for animal crackers?
 
City of Death, paralysis, moral cowardice.
Strike the gong, stranger, and sound your own death knell!
What kind of fancy-ass death is this?
Three questions—then one death! 
What an advertisement for the Executioner!
 
Yet the Principessa's life-chilling spell is undermined 
by the peasant girl 
The one with the house-dress schmatta "a slave"?
Not even black, what kinda place is this?
leading the refugee ruler fleeing an unstable empire, a coup d'etat, 
driven from the throne by a CIA plot—
You're tellin' me! You can't trust those guys! 
Take a note to Secretary what's-his-name!
Who's the goddam press secretary this week?
 
And she sings—God, do they go on, same thing
over and over! Do they think we're deaf?—
of her devotion to a pathetic old man,
Antigone leading blind Oedipus to Colonnus
but in actuality stealing the hearts of the multitudes 
            Shutup! shutup! shutup!
by her selfless compassion
What's she on about?
And then the hairy dude—who's he for heaven's sake?—
pours out his heart back to her 
What's everybody yelling about? Don't these foreigners 
know how to behave?
 
Rises, laboriously, from couch. Bends. 
Searches among the puddle of remotes and other
devices on the coffee table, most of them coated in black plastic. 
 
For crying out loud! If any country deserves a scourge of nature,
a plague!  
A microbiotic fiend...
 
It's this one.
                        

An ordinary Saturday of the soul,
old places seen anew,
refracted in the spirit tongue 
of some new seeing 
 
Salt air, aura of the sea
where my mother wished to be 
Old houses, worn edges
betokening my father's thoughtful scrapes
 
March gray, wind off water
life in those beckoning flourishes of color 
Raw edges on troubled days
only the birds have softened 
                        

I was with the daughter 
when she learned that her mother,
that extraordinary woman, had died,
alone, at home, in the city 
 
One thing I recall, from the little
she told me afterwards
was the reply she made 
to a counselor's question.
"What was the most ordinary thing 
about your mother?"
 
I couldn't think of a single ordinary 
about my mother.
 
And, perhaps an instance of that theme,
on another occasion, some of us 
remembering what we used to have for dinner.  
"My mother didn't make dinner."
 
Later, what she said, as we traveled about, 
road gypsies that summer, staying in other people's houses,
or sleeping in a tent in Nova Scotia,
or in the back of a friend's VW bus,
and—that once—in an abandoned dump truck 
 
that has stayed with me 
is her timely lament, 
when one or another of her friends prepared to retreat
homeward, for R'n'R,
after this or that disappointment or mere waste of time, 
"I wish I had parents!" 
 
I counted the singles in my wallet,
hoping for enough to take the LIRR 
back to mine.