To clarify: I am agnostic when it comes to coincidence; when the neighbor’s Rubenesque pooch barks in the same tonal register as Paul Simon, I do not take it as a sign of anything, really, beyond my own thoughts. Which confuse even me. So I’m reading this poem by Ted Burke and it reminds me of yes, Paul Simon (but not the dog) and even more of a few lines by Pablo Neruda, and more as well, but at the time I responded to Ted I couldn’t quite recapture the poem, which is not online. So I wrote a quick response and then looked up the words (it’s called “Brussels”), viz.

I have sought and found, wearily,
under the ground, between the fearsome bodies,
like a pale-wood tooth
coming and going under the tough acid,
alongside the materials
for a death agony

Then my brain got stuck. It jammed up very suddenly and started skipping like a record (remember records?). It was like two groups of people were singing two poems as rounds. The first group was chanting “Brussels”, and the second group “Campo Dei Fiori” by Czeslaw Milosz. Bam, skip, bam, skip, bam.

I like to think of myself as a cultured guy, but I don’t normally walk around with all this damn poetry clogging up the works. Backing up: this thread got me thinking about evil. One thing lead to another, and next thing mrs. august knows she can barely fit on the bed for the stack of books on the Holocaust (which is a hokey way, at this point in the century, to deal with the problem of evil, but that’s where I was, and mrs. august mad at me besides, and I’ve got to write an article (that as perhaps you, gentle reader, can tell, I really don’t want to be thinking about)).

Anyway, “Campo dei Fiori” is about a square in Rome, but really it’s about a carousel that was set up outside the Warsaw Ghetto. It continued to operate as the ghetto was being, ahem, “cleared.” The poet compares the crowd’s indifference to the way Italians reacted to the burning of the philosopher Giordano Bruno at the stake. It got stuck in my head, the poem, and the other poem too. (Lest you think I’m trying to show off or be annoyingly erudite – the last thing that got stuck in my head was a Seal song with my eyes becoming alive by the light that you shine etc and so forth). It’s a lot to be carrying around all the time, and not especially good for my marriage, or my article. That, and a cool piece about libraries. Oh and something about prison ships that seems to have created not the smallest echo of a stir in the US.

After all that, I have very little to say about evil, or anything else. It’s just that I think that politics is more than arguing whether a party nomenklatura should anoint a or b (and pretending that either choice is more democratic). Mostly I’m stuck: bam, skip, bam. Here’s the round:

Sometimes the wind from burning houses
I have sought and found, wearily,
Would bring the kites along
Under the ground, between the fearsome bodies,
And people on the merry-go-round
Like a pale-wood tooth
Caught the flying charred bits
Coming and going under the tough acid
This wind from the burning houses
Alongside the materials
Blew open the girls’ skirts
For a death agony
And the happy throngs laughed

On a beautiful Warsaw Sunday.