from “all along it was a fever: a what poem”

xxxix

The hard edge of historical light, it waits up for us

all night. Here’s one brutal but apparently

necessary historical bargain: I said that the energy

between you and the person next

to you is truer than it is real. This is not a randomly

existing fact. It’s a collectively and intelligently and menacingly

cultivated feature of our lives. Fugitive fact.

This puts you both—puts

us all—in peril, yes, but protects that energy between us.

If it were the other way, if that living thing between

us had become more—even as—real as it is

true we’d be more protected than we are

but that thing, that sacred being

-between would be endangered. The intelligence

of collective action knows, somehow, that that

kind of security is far more dangerous—the kind of danger

people become to themselves, then to each other,

the kind they become to each other, then to themselves—

than the peril in which we stand now. That’s a hard

historical edge to stand near, real talk, that’s the broken

back of a mother—black—skipped across a wit-quick crack in the sidewalk.