ON SEEING AN AERIAL PHOTO
OF THE PEACE MARCH,

January 26, 2003

Five thousand people marched slushy streets under a steady snowfall yesterday in the culmination of a weekend of anti-war events in Pittsburgh.

After the march, streets choked again

with cars and cabs and trucks

delivering goods as if we had never

walked over those white and yellow lines.

*

Frank and I sit in a diner drinking coffee

that scalds the roof off your mouth.

They’ll let us stay here forever,

snow melting quiet blotches into our jackets,

then the blotches disappearing.

*

The anarchists still wander, anxious

to be noticed, to punctuate the rage

that roils inside us, or maybe

they’re just young and clueless.

*

How did Peace March get yanked

into Dismissive Sneer?

We swill our heat in silence.

Nearly fifty, politely grizzled,

edges rounded into the proximity

of harmlessness. Yet we too

do not want to leave.

*

Traffic, bulky and rude, unyielding,

recaptures control, filling lanes

with protective metal and the idle of power.

Gas, brake, gas, brake, behind the police

reopening or reclosing, depending

on your pedestrian nature. A pregnant

woman wades past outside,

gentle clouds of her erupting smile.

*

You might call that manipulative.

But there she is, pausing at a red light.

Little harmonica notes surround her

like summer’s gentle bees. She’s smiling

at no one and everyone. The light changes

according to a system of timing and order.

*

Thousands of us—regardless of the wicked smear

of biased counting—marched down 5^th Avenue.

I never do the chants. Frank does. I like the simple

shuffle and scrape of feet.

Snow drifts thick in slow fat flakes. If I told you

we looked beautiful in that cool confetti honoring only

the fact of our presence, would you say I was

skewing the figures? Oh, the heart’s muted math.

What do we know? The coffee’s cold,

and we have not said a word, old friend.

*

My own daily cruelties and penances

and petty lies, temporarily at bay, stuffed

into salt-stained gloves and under the knit hat

colored with the flag of some country somewhere.

The pregnant woman pulls herself up onto a bus.

Soon, she’ll be blessing someone with a name.

Puddles on the floor beneath us, and still we sit. 

Gas, brake, gas, brake. Lights turn without us.

*

March 20, 2003. To freshen the shame

of reference. To turn on the TVs of memory

and despair, to walk away again

from the rigged game, pockets

empty with spite.

*

At the end, young protestors held a die-in

on the cold wet concrete in the middle of 5^th.

Frank and I have no interest in even pretending

to die. Those pretending looked too beautiful,

sprawled into elegant shapes as the snow

kaleidoscoped down on them.

*

And if I say those flakes were the largest, softest

flakes ever, you might say I’m exaggerating.

And if I say you had to have been there,

you might say I’m copping out. I’ve given up

on worrying what you think, all these years later,

the truth set on fire, stomped on like a cruel trick.

*

Two months later, the smirking crew announced

Shock and Awe, and I clicked off my radio and hung

my head, and pushed in an old cassette of two old men

joyfully acoustic with blues to keep me on the road.

In the dusty light of calm dark, I imagined our voices

 carving a wistful song about peace.

*

We drifted like snow on the closed-off street,

marching in ragged non-formations,

and some took pictures and others took notes,

but most of us just made footprints

that would soon disappear

and snow melted against our faces

so that it may have looked like we were crying

but we were not crying.

*

Not yet, crying. Not yet, not yet dying.

We absorbed the blessing of snow

as we marched, our breath blending

with the breath of thousands

against what we knew was coming.

Then, the streets of war opened again.