I wasn’t going to go to Zuccotti Park today. I’ve been struggling to keep pace with obligations, and this morning I woke with an upset stomach that I attributed at least in part to the emotional churning of yesterday’s OWS eviction watch. “Something’s got to change,” I thought to myself. “I can’t expect to go there every day forever, and probably this police raid is a personal sign to me, just like it is to the overall movement, that it’s time to regroup, invent some new tactics.” But after a yoga class I felt a little better, and as the afternoon wore on, I felt odder and odder about not knowing what was going on in lower Manhattan. Sometime after 3:30, I printed BECA– USE THEY’RE TRYING TO DRIVE OUR PLANET OFF A CLIFF on a 9 X 14 piece of cardboard (so as to spare my large foam board sign the destructive effects of moisture), grabbed my venerable copy of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson as edited by Thomas H. Johnson (Little, Brown and Company, 1960), and set off in a rain that had seemed rather romantic earlier in the day, when I was walking through Prospect Park on my way home from yoga and admiring the contrast of still-colorful leaves with the gray rainlight, but now revealed its bone-chilling properties.

I found the park surrounded with police barricades, and so empty-looking that at first I wasn’t sure if members of the public were being allowed in. Then I realized that the clumps of umbrellas near the Broadway end belonged to Occupiers, and made my way to the one entrance point, a one-person-wide aperture in the barricades about halfway up Liberty Street. The aperture was flanked by police officers, and I almost expected them to put me through some kind of security check, but they didn’t try to stop me. I meandered among the planters and concrete benches, wondering whom to approach. Men in green vests, employed by the park’s victorious owners, Brookfield Properties, were strolling around looking for bits of trash to sweep up.  A couple of people took pictures of my sign–signs were in short supply, what with the rain and general disorganization, so I guess I presented a good photo op. I spoke to a young woman in a UAW poncho, telling her I was a member myself. “I’m not a member, I’m a friend of the UAW,” she said, adding that she had just spent a couple of hours at a union office helping get ready for the big demonstration tomorrow, when labor contingents will converge on Foley Square as part of a city-wide day of action marking the second month anniversary of the Occupation. Together we went to speak to a young man with a badge identifying him as a library worker. He was sitting on a bench under a couple of umbrellas, one of which sheltered a few dozen books covered with transparent plastic. I asked about the fate of the 5000-book library, which early news reports following the raid had said was destroyed, a report that had later been contradicted when the police put out a statement that possessions could be reclaimed at a midtown warehouse. “Did you hear about the photo the police posted on the Internet?” he asked. I hadn’t. He said that the cops, becoming alarmed at all the criticism they were receiving for destroying books, had “gone dumpster diving” and retrieved what they could salvage, then photographed them and posted the image to make it appear that all would be made right. “But it was just the books in relatively good condition that they took the picture of, and really almost everything is trashed.” The same was true, he said, of electronic equipment, medical supplies, and just about everything else belonging to the Occupiers that had been on site at the time of the raid. (I thought briefly of my books, and the books of friends that I had donated early on, before I even started coming down to read poetry–now lying mangled in a trash pile somewhere.) I told the library worker I felt like an idiot for having given any credence to the police story, for even though I’d told myself to wait for confirmation, I admit that when I heard about the supposed opportunity to reclaim possessions, I started to think that maybe the tactics of the raid hadn’t been quite as senselessly brutal as initially reported.
  
I went and stood up against the police barricade, facing the sidewalk on Broadway, and held up my sign there. With difficulty, I held sign, book, and umbrella all at once, and read Dickinson’s “I measure every Grief” (“I measure every Grief I meet/With narrow, probing, Eyes–/I wonder if It weighs like Mine–/or has an Easier size.//I wonder if They bore it long–/Or did it just begin–I could not tell the Date of Mine–/It feels so old a pain–” (272). The poem is 10 stanzas long, and before I finished, the page was quite damp with raindrops. I had meant to read more, but I didn’t want to drench my book. I felt angry and empty, standing there in the middle of the sanitized vacuum the police had created (where they make a desert, they call it peace); and at the same time, listening to the conversations going on around me, I felt that they hadn’t succeeded, that the spirit of Occupation was alive and well despite the penning and driving out. A thin-faced brown-skinned man in a hoodie approached on the other side of the fence, sweeping his eyes across the space in back of me. “That was my home,” he said, with bemused irony. He wanted to know how to enter the park; I explained about the narrow aperture on Liberty Street, and he went off to find it. Then I stood for a while next to a white man who was describing to a younger black man the evils of the stop and frisk program, and why America has got to rethink its priorities. “But what’s wrong with owning 7 cars? That’s the American way!” I heard the young man protest. I couldn’t be sure if he was serious, or just having some fun with the Occupier. I spoke to a woman from Taos, New Mexico, who said she’s hoping that the mostly white, middle-class Occupy movement there will find a way to connect with the large groups of less affluent people who are affected by massive foreclosures.  “I’ve been in Taos for about a year–I used to live in New York–and it’s really strange, I’m in some sort of enclave–unless you go to a Wal-Mart, you don’t even see the people who mostly live there.” I endured a monologue from a 24-year-old passerby who said that the universe is programming us, but there’s a flaw in the genetic code which he is trying to correct with the benefit of certain secret knowledge at his disposal. I retreated further into the park and listened to a discussion, broadcast on People’s Mic, about the prospects for reclaiming personal possessions seized by the police. I went home in the rain.

Tomorrow, they/we will try to shut down the financial district. Tomorrow they/we will go into the subways en masse, preaching the gospel of the 99%. Tomorrow, they/we will gather in Foley Square. And on Friday at 4 p.m., a few of us will gather at Broadway and Liberty to read poetry once more.