It Takes a Man

It Takes a Man

It Takes a Man

It takes a man in all he might be
heavy twisted rope of consequence
of no consequence
weighed in the balance and found wanting.
Not a man but a twister.

Outside the mob demanding: “Who comes?
Who is it now dares speak for us,
for our lives?”

The virtues work
through us. They do not
indwell. They do not
inhere. They are not
in here. There are no
virtuous people
only good acts,
always virtue and its opposite –
the virtues work through us.

It takes a man to unmake
his masculinity, to unmake
the man they made him.

We are come to this. Coming
here in all innocence, willing to hear,
willing to be made and unmade
and taught the virtue of checking
our facts, consistency, avoidance of error,
making a life appear reliable,
a narrative, a story we tell others:

My name is . . . I live at . . . I am . . .
I have . . . I want to . . . with you

that they may understand who it is
speaks to them today,
and who they are every day of their lives
until there are no more days.

Someone will come after me and say:
“This poem was said once, as I am saying it
now,
as others will say of me:

‘He breathed – he spoke – he stood
in the garden at midnight and wondered
at the cruelty of a mortal brain
coming to consciousness, the wonder of a mortal
brain

coming to consciousness,
the birth and death
of individual consciousness.’”

Living appeals, as you appeal

to me, as I appeal to the gods – those crazy
imaginary gods –

as I appeal to the soldiers
beating on my door

The great Emathian conqueror did spare
The house of Pindarus . . .

But in wartime
Husbands dragged from wives
Sons from mothers.

At Rodez once,
the Nazis in retreat,
shot thirty Maquis with tommy-guns,
smashed in their skulls with stones
to finish it. At Rodez in August 1944,
the day before the town was liberated.

At Rodez, the wind out of Rodez,
whipping the hill, whipping the old asylum
carrying the cries of the mad
to the townsfolk, the benighted townsfolk,
the cries of Antonin Artaud,
still awaiting liberation
at the psychiatric hospital
with its garden and little chapel,
the asylum where he grew his hair
and was visited nightly
by his Daughters of the Heart.