Marx in Heaven
Karl Marx, this restless eve, in his hovel
in Heaven, obeys the historic necessity to reorder his papers,
a small penance, Bakunin teases, for having seen so much so clearly
yet ending up so wrong in so many predictions. The free-wheeling cherubs
snub this cottage that clings so tenaciously
to its evaporating foundations of cirrus. Tired of manning the feather duster,
Karl wants to ask Engels for money to hire a maid,
but Jenny won't let him: "We shall celebrate Glory, at least,
without bourgeois affectations."
Yet here in Berkeley life is not quite so idyllic.
Alison frets about the car mechanic, whether he's a crook or not,
whether after this standard 3000 mile tune-up
she'll ever drive the bug again. We're going to eat
fettucine alfredo and alla puttanesca at the Café Venezia
and I have scenes of black olives and garlic-rich anchovy sauce
lingering in the storefront theaters of my mind. But first
we digress towards the Bank of America ATMs
arrayed against the brick wall on Shattuck
by Shattuck Square. A starch-bloated female
mendicant in a pale, disheveled pullover
flashes a laminated card that reads "disabled"
and she pleads, "Help me I'm disabled help me
please I'm pregnant and disabled!"
The way urgency twists her mouth
is too coarse to be aesthetic. Poverty
should not dress so naked.
My heart turns into a clump of crumpled film.
Someone in sleek red leather leaves ATM row
and yanks away her boyfriend, flashing a peeved glance,
"I wish she'd just crawl somewhere and die!"
The bricks in the wall seem like the dull eyes of a potato.
In Heaven out across the water towards the anticyclone,
Darwin studies arctic terns
and worries about the fate of the environment. He has calculated
falling migratory populations and is left no little disturbed.
He shakes the writer's cramp from his arm
and floats upward into the troposphere,
enjoying the chill taste of the thin air, before he catches wing
of an upper westerly so to arrive by midnight,
disguised as a bearded Lady Godiva at Sir Charles Lyell's costume ball,
so spendidly nestled in the picturesque cumulus formations
overlooking the Sierra Nevada.
After Alison deposits three checks and pockets her transaction slip,
I turn to see that the woman has been nudged aside
by another, suaver beggar.
"Can you spare any change this good evening? Thank you. And you, sir,
Yes, it is a charming night."