After Lucretius
This is what Peace feels like: to drive home from work
and get held in traffic waiting for the wreckers
to clear a lane, then pass EMTs peeling back
the roof of a Voyager, its front stripped off,
facing a Camry with its engine in its seat.
Troopers’ torches wave traffic through the strobes;
You continue home to a wife and a child and a dog.
Or you get up in the morning and the radio
describes the disintegration of Yugoslavia:
In Bosnia, the Serbs pick apart Sarajevo,
a translator relays a father’s grief
for his only child; meanwhile the mujadeen
squabble over Kabul, and you find yourself
driving to work the same as every morning,
cows grazing the fields, mist rising to Greylock.
Or you read the papers: a boardroom coup at GM,
Clinton wins delegates in Pennsylvania,
police not guilty, the market up ten points;
and then you eat lunch.
What dribble our lives are!
How much of this is real? We all hope
to escape from pain, to find delight in our senses;
we don’t want to worry, nor wish to fear death.
A great big house is fine, with marble floors,
cherry paneling, an indoor lap pool,
and the whole place wired for state-of-the-art sound;
but our best times are often spent in some field
in late summer, lazying amid grasshoppers
and black-eyed-susans, clouds above going nowhere,
a stream somewhere off beneath some trees.
When we fall apart it really won’t matter:
the hospital will take us in grudgingly,
eventually we’ll have to leave in a hearse.
So even if you handle the telephones
with style, and your receptionist brings in coffee
and your assistants nod at all the right lines,
if this shit doesn’t scare death, is it worth it?
Just find me a man who has given away everything
he owns to those he loves, he could walk right in
to the biggest den of thieves without a care.
Remember as kids, we looked under the bed for bogeymen?
God, now in daylight, the ghosts are all around us!
Then this is it. This is the feeling of peace.
