April 2, 2206

I went to the immigrants’ rights rally yesterday on the basis of an e-mail announcement from Brooklyn Parents for Peace. I expected something small—was amazed when the bus got to Boro Hall and I saw the streams of people heading through the greenmarket, on to Cadman Plaza….It was exuberant, massive—the bridge approaches totally clogged; at one point the press of people felt a little scary though everyone was very good-natured, helping each other. Lots and lots of small kids, even infants; in general a very young crowd. We climbed over a low fence—the nuns in skirts turned back, Mexican nuns with an Anglo priest from the Church of St. Jerome: “Excuse me, I’ve got to catch up with my sistuhs,” said the witty father. Chants: Aquí estamos, no nos vamos, y si nos hechan, regresamos. Lots of American flags and more flags of Latin American countries—many I don’t know, but there was representation that I saw from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Ecuador, Colombia. Many accommodating signs—“I came here to work,” “I pay taxes,” “America, we love you”—and a few more militant messages….Apparently a lot of church organizing, even to the extent that one group began chanting, “El pueblo, en Cristo, jamás será vencido.”

4/3: Teaching today, and a really gorgeously good book of poems called Eye of Water [by Amber Flora Thomas]—it took the bad taste of Mary Oliver out of my mouth.

4/9: In my dream: a man with a body as long as a long wall was wide lay stretched on a bench. He was guarded by men ranged at intervals, post-like, with their hands on his legs, waist, elbows. A low-ceilinged setting—a tavern, a waiting room—and an “audience” of patrons sitting at tables. It was very disturbing, like a horrible deformity—but was it also, somehow, a moral deformity?

4/12: I finished Directed by Desire, J. Jordan’s complete poetic oeuvre….There’s wonderful, wonderful stuff in it but I did feel so exasperated, finally, every time she’d go off to another part of the world, either physically or in her head, and write about another self-determination effort. She does so much better when she writes what’s close to home. Of course it was important that she went to extend solidarity, but did she have to speak it in the form of poems? It occurs to me that she was cursed with having a poetic voice that was heard.

It occurs to me that I am like a nuclear testing range, or like the DMZ between North and South Korea: by being devastated (i.e. rendered virtually inaudible) I’m preserved, my words allowed to luxuriate, wild, free, prolific.

4/15: In the hall [at school] yesterday: X: “But it’s not [Senator John] McCain’s fault that Kerrey invited him [to speak at New School commencement]!” Y: “It could have been a lot worse—he could have invited Bush!” Z (who was on the honorary degree committee, which of course did not recommend giving an honorary degree to McCain!)—“I don’t feel like going to the dinner—but then again, I’m not sure what my boycott would accomplish. Maybe I should just watch it unfold.”

4/16: Mrs. M’s first name is Marion [neighbor]. Why does the “o” spelling seem so old-fashioned to me? She complained of the shoddy work done on her stoop—“Not that I’m against foreigners, but they come over here and think they can just approach the work any old way when you have to proceed in a certain way with these houses. Why, the job they did out there on the stoop—it’s all patchwork! I could have done a better job myself!”

So, we had lunch; I worked on a packet; took calls from A and B; read a lot of pages of Delany (The Motion of Light); had dinner, cleaned up, helped W. take out the industrial strength garbage bags left over from last summer’s painting….Marked papers—

So tomorrow the petition campaign [opposing the invitation to Senator McCain to speak at New School commencement] launches. McCain has his surreally, in a way hilariously militaristic bio up on the [New School] Web site—listing his awards for warring and mentioning him as the heir of Barry Goldwater.

I love the Delany book for many reasons that will likely cause students to be critical—its density, the quirkiness of mind in which it shamelessly indulges. That vision of the particularity of a time. The portrait of a gay marriage between a man and a woman—

4/22
The other night at po group…X told about visiting a 300-acre landscaping project, owned by a private citizen, that’s going to replicate the entire range of forests from down South to [the estate’s New York location] and what would come after. (Each tree has its own individual water delivery system.)

R.: “I like the subset of people who live with a West Indian, so the W. Indians do this thing called chups, it’s an expression of distaste, and these people have picked it up so they do it but they don’t really know how to do it.”

4/29: The moment today, after the demo, when I stood on the Brooklyn Bridge and saw the city before & behind me—the blue harbor—a high-masted ship—Governor’s Island—the Watchtower building—all laid out in cool sunshine. As if meant to belong to one, as if meant to be always.

One thinks, of course, of Whitman.

The people of various colors coming & going like angels on Jacob’s Ladder—

Even today, in the sun, some people were still fortified against the cold in wool hats, warm jackets—while others were bare-armed.