One-Six

January 6th he was blowing smoke as usual

And then his apparent peroration

But maybe it was only a “Mutholini” (Pound, Canto LXXX) pause

“to give his throngs time to soak up and agree with the clarity of his intellectual wisdom”   (Wayne Hogan on Mussolini’s orations)

Clearly he looked as though he had thought twice when he stepped back to the mic and set them loose

On to the Capitol

Purpose implicit, an order implied

“Trial by combat” (Giuliani)

“Fight like hell”

His serious decision to commit to sedition

Using the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, the Qs, the patriots with all their gear and flags in their gaudy grunge here from locales of pump jacks, trash heaps and crewcab pickups

Brewing since the election loss, poised for Electoral College certification on January 6th

Planned and plotted

A different transgression than shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue 

Since he could count, he’s been ready to do anything to benefit himself, born with one hand spinning the safe’s dial, the other in his pants  

He does not matter now except to history

He is toast  

“…a few years from now, will we really be able to remember what it was like these past four years… the bizarre sight of an obese, orange-haired septuagenarian President dancing onstage to the Village People” (Susan Glasser)

A pervasive and lingering stench

Like the raw sewage fetor from the Gowanus Canal on a still day

As that inside a Maasai mud and cow pie rondavel with the flies around it

It seems impossible that he was president

English have their ghost stories, ley lines, the Royals, Jonathan Strange fairies, murder mysteries, tabloid scandals, Brexit, bake outs

As it were

And we have our government-is-the-problem patriots, who are even goofier but AR-15 lethal

Pumped up hard for five years now

Here with us like bad genes  

Linked to all our racist and antisemitic Indian-killer roots and second amendment tropisms lifting the danger level toward vivid red

The chief ethical depravity of that bad man’s laissez-faire covid policy void was culling

Covid obtrusively and efficiently killing the geezers and fatso minorities

Pandemicid

Quietly pondered by the most brutal among us

Approaching the rationale, the Germans as a nation accepted Nazi eradication of Jews, Roma and Slavs from their European ken

To cleanse the Volk

Murdering multiple millions being assurance for the Germans of the superiority and historical justification of the Volk

That was a majority there that prompted the Holocaust

Our no-mask anti-vaxers here allows a piece of the covid horror  

That’s been rampant in the voting populations of the aged, urban, and rural poor

Andrew Como’s ugly paradigm holding scant solace for the Camp Auschwitz of our geezerheims

They “pass” fairly soon anyway

Rapidly downhill at eighty, difficult to remember them as they were

And nothing to do too about the-poor-will-always-be-with-us

Multiple generations sharing lost-job eviction hungry-kids poverty

In crammed apartments                                                                                     

Their kids without alternatives  

Their grandparents in degrees of privation

Massive national mosaic of familial and personal desperation

The millions here in a big jam

As it is too in much of the meridional world

One in ten in Los Angeles with covid, recently it went to one in seven

Midwinter Los Angeles, clear air with Santa Ana winds downslope out of the mountains wafting smog to sea

But the covid death rate this winter forced a true LA smog grotesquerie 

Ordering the county’s overtaxed crematoriums into slowdown

From their malodorous, sometimes black, reek

Some of the Stop The Steal believers said that the sky is not really the sky but a shield put up by the government to prevent people from seeing God

Simpletons’ ignorance in so much belief

“If a lonely child has no toys, he makes them” (W. S. Merwin)

And then it’s a given that spraying light-reflective particles throughout the atmosphere will make the skies look white

In predawn cold climbing the last few hundred meters of Emei Shan, 3094 m, for the sunup’s rose glow on the snow of Gongaa Shan’s sharp horn, 7556 m, off almost in Tibet nearly a hundred miles westward in the first Himalayan range   

Not far down from Emei Shan by Leshan, carved in the live stone of the Min River’s bluffs, the seventy-one-meter Buddha, a café to the side of the gorge to the Buddha’s right with a gaudy black-naped oriole on a low pine bough, Oriolus chinensis 

Such the almost constant near-euphoria of being in China

“The sun rises in the south east corner of things” (Pound, Cathay)

Here are short-eared owls and northern harriers coursing the same late winter dusk grasslands, both hunting as the sun goes down

Before January 6th for nearly a year we had been post the pre-covid past

 

Overhead the stars flash desperately,
switched on and off by racing clouds
which, only when they veil the light, reveal
their presence, like those clouds of the past
that wander through the soul…. 
                   (Tranströmer, "Epilogue," trans May Swenson)

 

Swaziland is Eswatini now, by the new king’s edict a couple of years ago
Little Ezulwini is still there on the Manzini Road, the old pineapple plantation and the little school by the new Swazi Royal Spa golf course

And my house-sit on the mountain is visible, different now with unfinished new concrete jutting out of the slope, the switchbacked lane up the same as it was

Living there was fresh as a creek washed bandana

Here right now a purposeful white-throated sparrow lands and abruptly shoulders an immediately acquiescent mourning dove four times its weight out of the way

Like the bad-omen hammerkops squawking chickenesque being pushed aside in Ezulwini by the fussy parrot flock from up the mountain 

The brown-necked parrots (now an endangered species) would land to drink on the bottom of the disused swimming pool where the hammerkops were capturing xenopus

All things organic decay to join the earth in the way memory slowly becomes one’s self

“The smaller boat puts out from the larger boat. / You are alone on the water. / Society’s dark hull drifts further and further away.”  (Tranströmer)

It was a long time ago, Swaziland