The Unitarian Church in Knoxville

is where we spent our Sunday mornings when I was a kid. That was in the old building, which had an odd smell and many strange angles and carpeted ramps we used to run up and down, and which was always overfilled with caring people. I don't think I've ever been in the new building; I keep imagining the horrible event today in the wrong place.

Thomas Disch is dead; I hate the world

One of my favorite poets, Tom Disch, has died in apparent misery and despair. I don't know whether to feel grief or rage.


A poem of his from twenty years ago - not his best, but fitting enough:


In Memoriam

Nothing, no one, gives me rest
I have put it to the test
And it is not an idle jest
The life I live must lead to death
An emptiness and end of breath
Though still my heart beats in my breast
Nothing, no one, gives me rest

The streets are filled with cryers crying
No end of them, nor yet of dying
Some men may smile a little while
If sellers sell and some are buying
But they will join the rank and file
Who decorate our ancient Nile
No end of them, nor yet of dying

Memorials are built and then
Time silts a harbor, forms a fen
And tells its immemorial jest
To the worst as to the best
The world will be as it has been
I am feeling so depressed
Nothing, no one, gives me rest

Andrew Olmsted

I was away from the web most of the day and so only just now learned the terrible news that Andrew Olmsted, a blogger I liked and from all accounts a very good man, was killed in Iraq yesterday.

Elegy for Sergio Vieira de Mello

Four years ago, on 19 August 2003, twenty-two UN staff members serving in Iraq were killed by a suicide bomber. Among the dead was the leader of the humanitarian mission, Sérgio Vieira de Mello. This as I recall was the first of many stunning tragedies in Iraq. I hadn't expected the invasion to turn out well, but I hadn't been prepared for something so horrible, and spent the next couple of days wandering around San Francisco feeling sad and angry and composing the following, which I post here because it's not getting any better sitting in a folder.



For Sérgio Vieira de Mello


Sérgio, it's been a week. I claim
the stranger's right to be growing more upset.
You're lying in state back home. It's winter there.
The trees must be restrained in splendor, the parrots'
cries in quieter Portuguese. But here
in San Francisco it's summer, not just in name;
girls in halter tops fill all the cafes
and Joseph Cornell stores on 24th,
Dolores Park's a beach of beautiful
male torsos and thighs, so many effortless
Michelangelos with faces of that rich
variety that men misname as race.

Sérgio, it's evening. I'm walking down
from Noe Valley to visit friends in the Mission.
Three ginkgos stand in front of an Irish pub,
The Liberties (as in Don't Be Taking, perhaps,
though Liberty Hill's not far away.) Amidst
the summer green are yellow hints of fall.
A few branches hang, broken and brown. Here
are pots of marigolds and foxglove. There
a manzanita's blossoms hang like pink
Chinese lanterns the size of nipples, a few
as red. A jacaranda, up here at least
the slenderest and loveliest of trees,
has lost its lilac blooms. The wilting rhyme
of the agapanthus stalks has been cut down.
Above, my country's flag is crossed with Castro's -
the field of stars on seven rainbow stripes.

Sérgio, perhaps you would have laughed -
a beggar - no, a homeless guy in a doorway,
autistic from hopelessness - by his side
his book of hours, a baby-blue pamphlet:
Some Basic Facts about the United Nations.
He must have picked it up for free downtown.
I hate the consciously inoffensive blue,
the trite coincidence, the pitiful man,
this magnificent beautiful city's failure to solve
the insoluble. Forgive the ugliness,
but this anger makes me want to puke.
Saddam, get of Hitler and Stalin, lives,
the spiteful madmen who killed you and your colleagues...
Arafat's New Year's "No" on peace to Clinton,
the sacrilegious green of Hamas's flag,
the "we wanna be a superpower" French,
Cheney, Rupert Murdoch, the neocons,
Bush's incuriosity - his complacent,
manipulated ignorance as good
as mendacity any day - "he often says
that life would be a lot easier if it were
a dictatorship." Even the dorky look
on the EMT's face as he carried an outraged child
from the skeletal bus the day that you were killed.
Seething, IQ plummeting, I've new
respect for all that you, with better grounds
for fury, accomplished in your life, and beyond.

Sérgio, you would have loved my friends,
Maarten and Chiara, too. I'd say
that they are people - smart and generous,
productive, in love - you could have been proud
to die for. But they wouldn't have asked, and you
didn't volunteer. Well, it's too late,
and better to think of happier things, like how
the other day my friends, out drinking, asked
for caipirinhas - in exchange for instructions, got
a round with Cuban rum in place of cachaça.
Going to bars with them is economical.
Strangers see them smile, hear them laugh,
and send us margaritas, a small blessing.

Sérgio, this neighborhood is rich
in people, poor in other ways - for San
Francisco, anyway. The dollar stores
are full. And here's a tall, sharp-spired church,
its unglassed windows boarded up and painted
gray, the great rose window slatted gray;
two motion-sensor lights point out the steps
are filthy - the only parishioners now are pigeons.
Chiseled into a column's base in German,
"Christ is the cornerstone."
                                            I think that we
should build new churches based on men like you -
not houses of worship - places to meet and plan
a better world. And here, more random luck,
La Iglesia del Buen Samaritano.
Light spills from the doorway. It's dusk. Late
for a home-cooked Italian dinner, I hurry by
and pass a lone Monarch fluttering north.