I got to Zuccotti Park shortly after 11 a.m., having hopped on the R train after my yoga class. I was just in time for the tail end of the march that was heading out to visit various Chase Bank sites in the Wall Street area before traveling uptown. This march was a march was just about any old march, so far as I could see; I later heard that some of the marchers had taken the opportunity to close their Chase accounts, but in my part of the crowd there was no opportunity to stop, as the people acting as marshals kept urging us to keep moving and close up any gaps. The group kept to the sidewalk, but at one point there was an admonition from a marshal–“Come on! We’re in New York! We jaywalk!!” The route took us east, then looped around back to Broadway and, pressed for time, I returned to the park to read a few Neruda poems.

I began with “The United Fruit Company,” in a translation by Ben Belitt from the bilingual edition Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda (Grove Press, 1961). I’d meant to read “A Few Things Explained” (“Explico algunas cosas,” about the devastation of the Spanish Civil War) and “Walking Around,” but in the event I was completely distracted by some young women standing behind me, who were shouting “The people united will never be defeated” at the top of their lungs while holding a banner from (I think) some sectarian organization. It was, suddenly, oddly, the Day of the Sectarians, and in front of me filed a throng of people with signs from the Workers World Party, from the International Action Center, from something called the League for the Revolutionary Party (I was handed a flier with their position statement and an ad for their magazine, Proletarian Revolution). Now, “the people united will never be defeated” is a slogan I have come to the point of absolutely refusing to utter, given what I regard as its tautological resonance and its status as a pseudo-revolutionary cliché; and some of the other slogans I was hearing (such as “Occupy Wall Street, not Afghanistan”), while completely unexceptionable in their content, irritated me with their baldness of language. Was it not more interesting and considerably more relevant to listen to “Heart of Magellan” (“El corazón magallánico, 1519”) from Canto General? Shouldn’t we reflect on how we all came to be here, on the violence that was Conquest? And yet–for this is the heart of my project: to juxtapose in the most literal way possible the two essential parts of my life, poetry and political activism–wasn’t there something symbolically fitting in the fact that Neruda’s strange associations and beautiful words were being drowned out by language that seemed utilitarian almost literally to the point of suicide? (Should I really say “drowned out”? Or was it more of a counterpoint?)

I read “Ode with a Lament” (“Oda con un lamento”) and headed for the subway. As I traveled under the East River, I was re-reading the poems I’d read aloud and  some others, and feeling critical of the liberties it seemed to me Ben Belitt had taken with his translations. When I got to Atlantic Ave./Pacific Street, I had to reckon with the fact that the Q train service has been suspended for repairs. I exited the subway and got onto a shuttle bus, where I became involved in the conversation of a young black man (I mean 30-ish) sitting beside me and a young black woman (of about the same age) who was standing in front of us, struggling with some items in a paper bag whose handles had broken. When we passed Grand Army Plaza, we all observed a gaggle of police officers, wondered what was up, and then saw that a few people were standing near the arch with a banner reading “WE ARE THE 99%.” The talk turned to protest. I suddenly realized that I didn’t need the plastic bag in which I was carrying my sign (BECA– USE THEY’RE TRYING TO DRIVE…etc.) and offered it to the woman, saying, “I can carry my sign from Occupy Wall Street without that bag.” “I think I’m going to go over there,” the woman said, and proceeded to detail the march route as she understood it.  I said, “It’s really energizing.” “Look,” said the man (and he hadn’t seen my sign), “why not–they’re driving us out of New York–actually, the world.”