This piece was started mid-February 2020 during a stay in Washington, D.C. Inspired by what I perceived at the time as an ominous national political climate, it grew over the course of the following month until its completion in a Flagstaff motel days after the start of national COVID lockdowns.
In a bar one Friday I sat for a beer
beside a man Washington-dressed, all clean and pressed,
but with shadowed eyes and a beard unsheared,
watch reading five o’clock.
I made some comment about the election,
pessimistic inflection masked by delection
of the comedy of the year;
he looked at me frankly with a glare of rejection,
giving no clues toward his selection,
nor hint or hope of redemption,
not even the semblance of fear.
Yet still I perceived a glimmer of shock in his stone-cold leer,
in his glass a rock under vodka clear,
queer and sheer like the granite peer he held unshivering,
though still I knew his heart was quivering
silently, as around people conversed
about all topics uncouth and perverse, and worse:
politics! and sex, and religion,
and about America’s divisions and their plans for revision,
and all the things at work they left,
and all the hell they drank to forget.
To his lips he pressed the glass and let the liquor mercifully beget
a grimace to drown the shadows out.
Then, over Friday shouts that rang all about,
he opened his mouth,
speaking clearly with no hint of ire,
though the words of his warning indeed were dire:
“Welcome friend to the city of fire, where desire never tires,
and liars and their buyers in high spires design,
in secret conspire and consign the world to its fate,
wining and dining from golden pates:
the heroes and villains we love and we hate.
All the urges unsated, always debated,
Washington-weighted and calculated
to discover what was fated and what wasn’t meant to be,
as the world outside waits to see
what they decide — iceberg tip of the mountains they hide.
Demagogues divide, and folks choose sides,
ever hopeful and full of pride.
Land of the free and home of the brave,
the great continent Eisenhower paved:
can it be saved?
Or will it crumble, under its weight collapsed,
thundering cataclysm of all they amassed,
in time by others passed, until at last
statues weep and buildings empty,
the land of plenty a hollow cast.”
Then, at last,
he set the glass down and turned in his chair,
no longer speaking, unwilling to share,
and no longer able to hold his glare,
reverting instead to a thousand-mile stare,
bare,
through the wall and across the streets,
past the spires and ivory seats,
across the ocean and away to the Moon
to flags there planted well too soon.
What a tune the Washington man sang…
And oh, how his hollow words rang,
clang and bang, against hope they sprang,
for my dizzy ears a bit austere,
as I shed in sorrow a lonely tear
to the drunken words of this seer undear.
Paying my bill, I left through the rear.
On alleyway shadows moonlight rained down,
white fluorescence cast around
the crevices and cracks in cobblestone found
in this ghastly town in marble crowned:
a city of phantoms in liquor drowned.
And so I saw, staggering in the street,
the moonlight’s troublesome retreat
behind cloudy sheets and night’s deceit into a darkening defeat.
Bleak, except a dome of lonesome marble,
bright as day bereft of sorrow,
pale as bone, smooth like carven stone
yet still in shadows cast and frayed,
behind fog dimmed and rain-decayed:
together, at once, hope and dismay.
And though rain falls and washes away,
as trees before the winds do sway,
across the sky it shines alight its splintered light
through night and day —
City of White in a world of gray.
© 2020 Ilyas Taraki
notes from my iPhone 