Borderline

Hermes to Persephone, After the March: May 1, 2006 

                                             —for Sarah Avery

Listen, sister, don’t get me wrong—
I like it that the dead followed you
from hell to the Washington Metro,
that you surfaced at DuPont Circle
and gave those fascist anti-immigrant
bastards the finger. The finger is a
good thing. Here in Jersey, it means
don’t fuck with me, asshole, don’t
turn left in front of me from the right
lane, don’t look that way at my niece,
don’t strand a city in a hurricane.
These messages are just and right.
But as the guy who put the psycho
in psychopomp, let me tell you
about the damned. They have issues,
they’ve got some exquisite needs.
Summon them to render strength
for a struggle, and soon they are
drinking your blood. It’s the ticket
price of communion, kiddo, and
no amount of vernal snap is gonna
change that. They love it when
cherry blossoms die, the dogwoods
explode and the bumble bees hum
their impossible way across the lawn
to the pale German tourists oozing
guilt like hothouse orchids around
the fountains for World War II. They
want to take in the show at the museum
of American Indian culture: who
knows more about pointless suffering
than the Cherokee and the Jews,
whose Holocaust exhibit hall
tears itself apart as you watch.
Makes you glad to be Greek.
Hades rapes you into his underworld,
the Earth Mother freezes the country
until you return, with just a seed
to complicate the deal. Badabing.
All the conflict out in the open,
leaving a chance for the whole family
to get together at the picnic in July,
just like always. If it makes Hera
happy, too much isn’t enough.
That’s what they need you
to think you think, anyway.
Which brings us to my tease:
What are you going to do with
the ravenous dead now that they’ve
risen? Not a rhetorical question.
I was hanging with my pal Coyote
the other day, and he was saying
Dude, seriously, if I had a
posse of the hungry Stolen Ones
I could do some wicked damage.
Revenants are memory itself,
they lead to foxholes, epidemics,
earthquakes, and the clover yards
of childhood where we cooked
grasshoppers with focused sunlight
before eviscerating their armor.
With that kind of ordnance,
people have to pay attention,
not to a cheap special effect
from The Lord of the Rings Part III,
to the urge they have to puke
when the next minor warlord
trades genocide for influence,
the pope considers condoms
as the final evil to perfect, I mean
protect, the breeding faithful,
and some girl in 2068 builds
a time machine to travel back
to Saratoga Springs for the last
bit of unadulterated H-2-O.
The dead, properly considered,
aren’t much like toothache
of the mind, but that itch you
can’t scratch between your
shoulders at the place the wings
should grow; they want to help
us, even in their envy; they
want to remind us that we
resemble them, that immortals
have an end, that the ones who
might be born will need sycamores
and public libraries and hot dogs
with sauerkraut and, dare I say,
an icy cold Coke. Once the dead
are done walking into traffic,
betting on the horses and buying
a dozen pairs of discount tube
socks at Target, feed them a little
bit of April, blow a wind into the
rumpled seersucker sleeves, and
point their toes at the suburbs.
Persephone, daughter of sky,
if I mean anything to you,
turn again to the feathered serpents
whose sting is truth and flight,
show no mercy to the folk
of this crack-addled world:
Make us remember you,
make us remember everything.