David Gullette
In Baghdad Mother of Us All
during The War Using Children
Saddam personally with his own pen drew up plans for
A Monument to Victory Against the Aggressor
years before victory was at hand
then had a cast made of his own right arm:
skillful Iraqi technicians expanded the scale
so that today two giant simulacra of that same forearm
erupt from the earth, each grasping a long curved sword,
the swordtips overlapping to form a massive arch
under whose forty tons of golden blade
bureaucrats pass daily to and from their dusty cubicles:
the President As Designer has the "earth" peeling back
from the upthrust in concrete petals or waves of crust
like a freezeframe splash of milk into milk
and spilling out the back side a sort of sloping runway
is peppered with hundreds of embedded steel helmets
looted from the hosts of the Iranian dead:
Shu Bin, the Advanced Chinese Artist, unbeknownst to Beijing
did a huge rubbing on paper of a section of the Great Wall:
up the side, the massive blocks, the mortar channels, the up-and-down
of the battlement, the tight cobbling of the walkway:
a 300x90 foot taped-together fabric of tissues flattened out cubist-style,
imprint of The Only Man-Made Structure Visible from the Moon
which the Central Committee meeting in the Forbidden City
forbade to be displayed in the People's Republic
on the grounds that it shamed in rankest bourgeois fashion
the Enduring Symbol of Nationhood, which ended up finally
stretched from North Roofbeam down to South Forecourt
in a gym at the University of Wisconsin in Madison:
when we descend from Lincoln or approach from the Reflecting Pool
we wonder if the long black slabs of remembering Those Who Fell
in The Loss of the War of the Planes Against the Peasants
are sinking into the clay or rising from it:
we kneel on the pavement or stand on the Park Service stepladder
holding the paper with one hand, the crayon rubbing back and forth
against the smooth-cut syllables of half-remembered love:
or simply lean a hand or brow against the words which are the shadows of the names
we called out to the flesh which is as gone as if it never were:
think of monuments as sheets of paper on which we write the bitterest of all poems
or think of the earth as a tabula rasa on which we inscribe
ciphers, runes, blips, mounds, names, as though nothing were nameless.
Tables of Content
Seventeen (Fall 2003)
Sixteen (Spring 2003)
Fifteen (Fall 2002) Fourteen (Spring 2002)
Thirteen
(Fall 2001) Twelve (Spring 2001)
Eleven (Fall 2000)
Ten (Spring 2000)
Nine (Fall 1999) Eight (Spring 1999)
Seven, (Fall 1998) Six, (Spring 1998)
Five (Fall 1997) Four (Winter/Spring 1997)
Three (Summer/Fall 1996) Two (Winter 1996)