from the salon of cultures

by Anne Waldman

Cairo tonguing

    out

                                          or Venice

Santa Maria del Soccorso   

turbulent skies

       1939 her

word

came out

             walking

in a djellaba

                       to hide  a body

what century

hold battle to tip a point

a Spanish flu

             a viper tongue in lockdown?

plague in the house / pox on the whitest houses!

Helsinki:  hint of a wall disguised

as munitions

Prague,

bridge of dreams,

        gets voice back

Vienna: nocturne of equilibrium,

teases stars,

      salon:   

Listen up!

larynx de-

fends

you will always be

     futurity

fending

off

public

hex

in the courtyard

    but wait enclosure

you are  spy for desire, for love

and you will be silence

as you close up

(Britain Moscow Stalingrad Midway El Alhamein

Guadalcanal Monte Cessino

Normandy Bulge)

note: skulls in

fish bowl

preserved

in elixirs for near extinction

    stations of a brutal cross

Arrete! “accumulations of memory”

syllables,

worry

themselves   of

   punctuation

an archeological divide

its asylum an aporia

what next?

    a holy cell of un–imagined peace sequestering?

o heal, o heal, o heal

 

(Fr the Archive:  Another comment objects to the phrase “tipping point” to describe when the planet reaches a threshold of irreversible climate change. “‘Tipping points’ is a propaganda slogan for the scientifically illiterate,” the comment reads. “They were a favorite of Al Gore’s science adviser, James Hansen.” The conglomerates go on about GREEN in the Biomass, a hoax . . . Are we at the “tipping point,” a huge paradigm shift where “chaos” in Chaldean meant “without a library”)