What Can Happen

What can happen are things that actually happen.
Benjamin Jealous becomes president of the NAACP,
and finds a woman named Love by the reflecting pool,
marching on Washington fifty years ago
and now: Martin Luther King,
Jr. Can a man ever shake his suffix?

While we march from monument to monument,
other monuments are erected in-between.
Under the big tents another man says to shake
your money maker. Shake that Money down!
What's true and what we just don't know yet.
At the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

(an oxymoron from the start), reporters for the New York
Times describe the Negroes as a separate group of people
with their particular interests and demands,
which particular interests and demands
may be met, rebuffed, or, per the preferred method
of Democracy, delayed. The Fired Next Time

'R Us, sings the walrus. And we are all together.
Headlines of the paper from August 29, 1963:
"200,000 March for Civil Rights"
and "U.S. Presses U.N. To Condemn Syria"
The news that stays news (only the bylines change)
is news: the Syrian Electronic Army pulls down

the website of the New York Times.
Fifty years and they're not too late.

I Dream of Jeannie

The title role to be re-cast with Scarlett

Johansson, yet undreamt of, already unbottled.

Her coif in Scarlet Woman, an original by Revlon,

and her trademark baby blues digitally untouched

per the contract, the better to beam into your eyes, dear.

O Scarlett, we can’t wait to see you smile.

Maybe not in this movie, maybe not even the next,

but someday you will be blessed

with happiness! We’ll be sitting in the dark,

crying when it comes. You may not know him now,

but Major Anthony is to be played by my master,

the magician. Only Brando, that old recluse,

considers the practice of the dark arts “abominable.”

Studio execs have no such problem.

My master the magician knows what movies are made for

and what dreams are good for. Just for your sake,

girl, be careful. Even a scarlet starlet can find her light

extinguished in a poof of black magic.

Picture Scarlett’s half-grin in a half-veil,

a slave to love, ironically, all her tears post-feminist,

and have sympathy! Ere Barbara Eden rears

her pink fez into the screen of your mind’s playhouse,

swear never to wear high-heels for anyone,

or cross your arms and blink twice to any question.

I’ll never get Jean mixed up with Jenny,

and I’ll never forget what’s-her-name.

No matter what happens, Scarlett,

you’ve pierced a hole in our eyes,

riddled as they may be with stars,

and the magician will pull you through

like a thread through the eye of a needle.

We'll make a necklace of needles. It’ll be so pretty.

Her Wayward Learning

The Great Learning

comes from clarifying

clear intentions,

in loving people

and stopping at the end.

Know when to stop,

then you may be certain.

Be certain, then you may be clear.

Be clear, then you may be peaceful.

Be peaceful, then you may keep steady.

Keep steady, then you may accomplish.

When I hired Confucius to teach my son, the genie, this is what he told me:

He will impart to him articles of the Great Learning,

which have to do with final ends and the mystery of the beginning.
But Kung, I protested, for genies who have no learning,
is it wise to start so far a ways back, from the beginning?

And Kung said, “A genie who knows not his head from his feet,

shall reach no further than the origin of his feces.”

“Things have origins and endings.

Events have a finish and beginning.

Knowing which comes first and which comes after,
is the only way to distinguish your head from your tail."

Jeanie, who never learned the mystery of her own beginnings,

finds herself bottled, corked, and castaway—in paradise,

the fiftieth state. A story wherein silver falsies give her away,

and the local angels get the feeling, blondie’s not

from around these parts. Long and short of it

was, not everyone could say, “I’m a genie person.”

So the difference between greater and lesser

angelic orders was lost on Jeannie, the philistine.

After applying herself at Oahu, Huahlu, and Malahu,

Jeanie goes to Honolulu, a beach bum.

Gathering volcanic detritus by night,

she builds a driftwood fire and resumes,

seated, sorting the white sands from the black.

Gardener of Teeth

Even now, when there’s nothing left but a name,
I think of walking with Jeannie in Ithaca, city of gorges.
She’s lagging two steps behind, and in her mind she’s blaming me
for walking too fast, when I’m walking at the same pace as always.
We take the hill while Ithaca, that sly city, shrinks back behind the hedges.
The streets unwind into a lone sidewalk splattered with gingko.
We call it Memory Lane when everything else has been forgotten.
Houses whose numbers are obscured by trees
with Fall leaves, but Spring flowers, as far as I can remember,
and children who’ve become the people I never met,
people whose last names have dropped out of the story—
great good-for-nothing Memory,miserly deceiver,
hoards its grist for the dream mill.
Jeannie flies away and lands in the USA.
(She never lands in LA.) Jeannie lands in DC
only to find the capital overrun by Mongols.
Catching the last passenger plane out of Newark,
Jeannie appreciates the opportunity, once again, to view the peaks
of mountains she’s never climbed, rivers she’s never crossed,
even the cracked ice of the Great North on which she’s never set foot.
She has her nose pressed against the plane’s plexiglass window
when it rounds the harbor into a full view of Hong Kong
crouching on the bay, a polluted Hawaii from the future.
As she stares, the city detaches itself from memory
like a hot air balloon rising over green valleys.
She was ill prepared for defeat in the Aloha State.
At the Battle of Waikiki, against enemy hordes
outside the gates chanting, “Gennie, Gennie,
who’s got the Gennie?” Jeannie lifts her sword high,
vowing to defend the one thing that grows for her alone,
a golem of pure imagination, her permanent doll, some kind of
Secret Garden.

Jeanie Dreams of Me

It’s not the solitude of a monk,

more of a butterfly I’d imagine.

It’s a tree alone like a monk in the mind

of a butterfly, or a butterfly that thinks

like a monk-fish on the line

of a prioress

or monk.

Keeping in mind silence,

even monks

have to sweep the floor

or water vegetables in the garden,

a spell which must have been broken

sometimes

by thoughts of dirt—or water...

and here comes a little tune:

Pigs!

Keep it down a little, will you?

Deep in Brooklyn, Jeanie is dreaming

of Sinatra audio masters dregged from the bottom of Gowanus.

They emerge tarnished like Spanish bullion from the sea.

Her bedside turntable sports a negative needle

for playing the masters ad infinitum, turning on and off

my turned-on master.

“Start spreading the news...”

from high-rise window cleaners to deep sea divers

who have a way of dispelling these vagabond blues.

Under a weight equal to Mt. Kenya,

they hold their breath for a stretch

of time unimaginable to landlubbers,

the soundless sound of which makes divers

among fish the greatest con artists in the world.

See them waving to tuna and mackerel,

taking a bow to the roar of a million fins clapping.

Then nothing—

not a bubble out of them for years,

while on land the a cappella chorus of porcine grunts

swirls above the rooftops like a wind slamming windows,

saving houses from the leaves

falling madly to the ground.