This Connection of Everyone with Lungs. Juliana Spahr

      poemwrittenfromnovember30/2002tomarch27/2003

       Note …

       After September 11, I kept thinking that the United States wouldn’t invade Afghanistan. I was so wrong about that.

       So on November 30, 2002, when I realized that it was most likely that the United States would invade Iraq again, I began to sort through the news in the hope of understanding how this would happen. I thought that by watching the news more seriously I could be a little less naive. But I gained no sophisticated understanding as I wrote these poems.

       September 11 shifted my thinking in this way. The constant attention to difference that so defines the politics of Hawai’i, the disconnection that Hawai’i claims at moments with the continental United States, felt suddenly unhelpful. I felt I had to think about what I was connected with, and what I was complicit with, as I lived off the fat of the military-industrial complex on a small island. I had to think about my intimacy with things I would rather not be intimate with even as (because?) I was very far away from all those things geographically. This feeling made lyric—with its attention to connection, with its dwelling on the beloved and on the afar—suddenly somewhat poignant, somewhat apt, even somewhat more useful than I usually find it.

       November 30, 2002

      Beloveds, we wake up in the morning to darkness and watch it turn into lightness with hope.

      Each morning we wait in our bed listening for the parrots and their chattering.

      Beloveds, the trees branch over our roof, over our bed, and so realize that when I speak about the parrots I speak about love and their green colors, love and their squawks, love and the discord they bring to the calmness of morning, which is the discord of waking.

      When I speak of the parrots I speak of all that we wake to this morning, the Dow slipping yet still ending in a positive mood yesterday, Mission Control, the stalled railcar in space, George Harrison’s extra-large will, Hare Krishnas, the city of Man, the city of Danane and the Movement for Justice and Peace and the Ivorian Popular Movement for the Great West, homelessness and failed coups, few leads in the bombing in Kenya.

      Today I still speak of the fourteen that are dead in Kenya from earlier in the week, some by their own choice and some by the choices of others, as I speak of the parrots.

      And as I speak of the parrots I speak of the day’s weather here, the slight breeze and the blanket I pull over myself this morning in the subtropics and then I speak also of East Africa, those detained for questioning, porous borders, the easy availability of fraudulent passports.

      I speak of long coastlines and Alexandre Dumas’s body covered in blue cloth with the words “all for one, one for all.”

      I speak of grandsons of black Haitian slaves and what it means to be French.

      I speak of global jihad, radical clerics, giant planets, Jupiter, stars’ gas and dust, gravitational accretion, fluid dynamics, protoplanetary evolution, the unstoppable global spread of AIDS.

      When I speak of the parrots I speak of the pair of pet conures released sometime in 1986 or 1987 that now number at least thirty.

      I speak of how they begin their day at sunrise and fly at treetop height southward to rest in the trees near our bed, beloveds, where they rest for about an hour to feed, preen, and socialize before moving on to search for fruits and seeds of wild plum, Christmas berry, papaya, strawberry guava, and other shrubs and trees that were, like them, like us, brought here from somewhere else.

      I speak of our morning to come, mundane with the news of it all, with its hour of feeding, preening, and restrained socializing before turning to our separate computers and the wideness of their connections and the probable hourly changes of temperature between 79 and 80 degrees that will happen all day long with winds that begin the day at 12 mph and end it at 8 mph.

      When I speak of the green of the parrots I speak of yous and me, beloveds, and our roosts at the bottom of the crater once called L’ahi, now called Diamond Head, and I speak of those who encourage us to think of them as roosting with us, Mariah Carey, Jermaine Dupri, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Jay-Z, Cam’ron, Justin Timberlake, Nick Carter, Rod Stewart, and Shania Twain.