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At Remembrance Of An Activist Poet
Comrade, ten years have passed since graduation.
From our freshman year, you spoke of socialist realism.
You affected the spectacles and beard of Trotsky;
the olive drab coat and cap of Castro;
and when you began to bald prematurely,
it was like the mark of Lenin, the mark of the beast.
And the Lady who loved you (inexplicably)
learned to repeat all of the revolutionary phrases;
she read the works of Lenin and Mao (in paperback);
and dressed like a fishwife on welfare
because that was socialist realism.
Once in a while, between meetings and manifestos,
between sit-ins and standards of conduct,
the two of you managed to lay each other.
But college is mostly artifice:
its society is a carnival of masks and amusements,
or the pastoral Arcadia of metaphysical poets.
There, the Party lasts no longer than any party.
After graduation,
the intrusion of reality is not gradual,
not theoretical, not subject to a five year plan.
Now you work for the Man in a call center,
taking customer complaints about
baubles that fail and luxuries not deluxe.
Your Lady left you faster
than your senior thesis on dialectic was forgotten.
She is a lingerie model now
(she specializes in pantyhose;
I have followed her career with---shall we say?---
a mounting interest that reaps sheer dividends).
She married an investment banker, the capitalist pig,
and his poems (like Stevens' and Eliot's)
are the products of evenings and weekends,
published somewhat exclusively.
She is the Muse and Mistress of them all.
The Soviet Union collapsed from slow death throes
the very first week she modeled pantyhose
(sheer, tan---I can surely tell you---with reinforced toes;
and not a single pair of shoes in sight,
not even the sensible kind Krupskaya favored).
A single bulb without a lampshade sheds light
in your studio apartment. On the floor
are scattered propaganda pamphlets,
cigarette butts, and unwashed glasses and socks.
Like the old Bolsheviks who were met with cold steel,
your experience of the proletariat dream
has become a protracted nightmare;
and memories, like an eager firing squad,
line up to take their best shots at you.
Sometimes, Comrade, the effects of revolution
are---to put it in a word---revolting.
