An Open Letter to America Jones, by Lulabell Petunia.

Do you remember how you said it,
with your hand at my waist,
as we stood at the corner that bright clear day
together, waiting for the light to change:
it will die soon anyway, it's already been cut.

We stood at the sidewalk, beside the small garden
whose color asserted against the concrete --
from the shadow of redbrick, and mortar constraint --
daisies and poppies and lavender.

I never told you how it broke my heart
to hear you speak those words then,
as I held in my hand the palest pink
poppy, its fragile few petals as though
threatened by the very breeze,
while cars
on the street kicked up gravel and
dust in the burning sun, and the men
digging in the street threw down tar.

You would have me believe
that flower and I were not alike,
that the blossom's pale pink
should be not fading, but gone...

that my willing it was enough
to bring it about, for my wanting
of some bit of beauty for
myself, that I cannot have:

a flower is made dead the very moment
it is made separate from the earth,
no matter that it yet
will take in water and sunlight.

These things are reflex, like the kicking
corpse of some slaughterhouse beast...

yet I cannot help but find myself troubled
to have this day conjured up again,

for perhaps it is useless to wonder
whether I truly heard it
in your voice when you spoke,
what troubled me so,

a certain violence measured
in centuries of afflictions, like
the face of a mountain
laid to siege by the wind,

a strange resolve
in your grim devotion
to this mythic truth,

that to really know a thing
one loves, one must destroy it.

But for the wind that would
topple the mountain,

when early on the crests
the air does fail of her
sheer ravishment
amidst the leaves,

in what could be
but a moment of compromise
there shall follow the wake
of the nameless gale
whatever storm follows
the next setting of the sun.

as if for fear of solace to know
whatever it is to love so deeply,
to lack every compensation for it...

but to somehow break the early lull
that burdens these mornings.

twilight hours,
when I see you on the television,
and cannot address to you my litany
of insane demands...

A bit of eloquence, some feeling
for beauty in life, for the clouds
heaped up at the end of autumn,
at the end of the day pouring forth
their purple blood onto the streets
and the lakes and the inland ocean.

How is it we are left
irrevocably to ourselves,
and to those things amongst which
we are entirely alone...

how if not for money or
god or power

I must listen
how you would rape
and murder and drop
poison on peasant families
from helicopters,
and carry that burden
in your breast...

but upon the footing
of our land
bare our throats
to the jackals in the desert,
to flesh the spirit
of Ares
in the ruins
of our glorious factories.