Habeas Corpus Jeffrey Schultz in memoriam the once-frozen North Our collective consciousness does not allow punishment where it cannot impose blame. United States v. Lyon Judge Alvin Benjamin Rubin, dissenting There is of course the other idea: that the intricate latticework Of our bodies loosed from us at last will leave us free To become anything, pure light, perhaps, or wing-beats In fresh powder beneath some maples locked up in their thin veneer Of ice. But then as always a sudden gust and the limbs’ clacking, And, as when some insurgent sound crosses over the porous border Of a dream, the world recrystallizes around us: midday, snow- Grayed, the wind-chill’s sub-zero like a ball-peen to the forehead. It’s cold enough to quiet even the soul’s feathery throat-song, And so it does. Nothing moves and I move through the woods At the edge of its city with dog, hoping he’ll shit his daily shit Before this reddening flesh numbs entirely. Nothing moves, But beneath months-thick ice and powder, winter’s put up its dead: Squirrels and sparrows, the wren and the fox, whole families Of field mice posed as if in the pet store’s deep freeze, even, Here and there, scattered and whole, occasional missing persons. For now, for guilty, for guiltless, no matter, the world offers neither Deliverance nor decay, and though we trust in that the thaw Will come, that someday soon some pond water, water Still and softly rippled as pre-War window-glass, will again reflect Its image of the bloodless sky, cut, at intervals, by spring’s First returning vultures, and though the police will then take A little comfort, as they kick the MOBILE CRIME LAB’s tires Before rolling it out for the season, that the birds help at least To ease the legwork, we know no one’s, you know, going to be Set free. The skull’s thin as eggshell so far as the beak’s thick curve Is concerned. The raisin of the eye’s an easy delicacy. And so to imagine the future is to imagine the present, but warmer, But more forthrightly, more honestly violent. And so another day’s Bones picked clean. There is of course the idea’s consolation: For eternal patience, eternal reward, for the meek, the Earth’s Corpse. Instead, a sort of waking sleep, a sort of waking slow; We rub our eyes, warm the last of yesterday’s coffee, stare As our email loads: surely something must have come, surely Someone has spirited us that which would make all the difference. We call to complain that nothing’s working because we like The on-hold music, which is a sound other than our breathing. We ask the music if we can speak to its supervisor but when we try To explain it only laughs, Guiltless! Who do you think you are anyway?, Laughs its little soprano sax laugh before it loops back to its loop’s Beginning. The coffee pot runs on mediated coal and drips acids. The car’s topped up with artillery and emits amputees. The idea was Waking would make things clearer, would startle us as from any night’s Nightmare: these sheets’ cold which is not bare concrete floor, This patch of light the moon has cast not the interrogator’s light, This knocking in our head not some still-indecipherable code Tapped against an adjacent wall by who knows who, by someone We can’t even begin to imagine, someone stuck here longer Than even ourselves yet still committed to the idea that finding A way to speak to each other would help matters, this knocking None of that but rather something real, here, furnace clank or thief In the night, something real and something present and not The dream of what must be held that way until it stops thrashing, Not the dream of being held that way, but what could be danger Or else nothing once more, which means we prowl once more The house, ridiculous in our underwear, ridiculous with a flashlight Gripped like a truncheon, the floorboards cold somehow as bare Concrete, the floorboards that croak somehow like vultures who are Not here, who winter south, scan the Sonoran desert’s northern Edge, its empty water bottles and tire ruts and those nameless It dries to a sort of jerky, those nameless who labored in vain To cross it, who had hoped that in crossing, they would be set free. Nothing’s wrong, the house secure, bolts bolted, latches latched. Somewhere in the distance beyond the kitchen window, downtown And its bus bench bail bondsman, downtown and its graffiti Covered wall’s Great Writ: Repent! The End Is Nigh! As always, as always, Answers the darkness. But, pre-War? In what will soon enough be Dawn-light, in this near-light, who can tell if it’s blood spread thin On our hands or else just a healthy, living glow? Outside, the idea Of night and the idea of day seem to have come to a standoff. No one’s calling for negotiations. We know what happens next: Whether the stars flicker or merely flinch, the sun, whose face Is a badge, has always been a little trigger happy. And though The firestorm will consume, soon enough, everything, it seems For the moment this will go on. As if indefinitely. As if without cause. 2014 by Jeffrey Schultz. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem “The notion in Genesis that the context of universal human guilt arises from some act that is both distinct and distant from our own actions, and yet is something, nonetheless, that resides in each of us and marks us each individually, becomes, I think, fully realized in the age of global capital. War, torture, climate change, all manner of exploitation and oppression: when I look closely I can’t see how these are in any way separate from any moment in my life. It may be considered impolite to mention it, but that only means that politeness too has become a mechanism of the wrong’s perpetuation.” —Jeffrey Schultz
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 18:48:29 +0000
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