Of all the poems in these pages
Only one
Entitled Desert
Has garnered the approval of strangers
And I fear that those who approve of it
Approve of something in it of which I disapprove
Namely the ostensible sentiment of the following line
The Hindus Muslims Jews Christians and agnostics deserve to die
And indeed the whole last stanza
Even though earlier in the poem
The opposite assertion appears
Characterizing the belief that the wicked deserve to suffer
As a canard
Now any reasonable person understands
That mutually exclusive statements cannot both be true
So which one is false
Unless they both are
That the justice or necessity of suffering among the wicked is a canard
Or that all humans deserve not merely to suffer but to suffer and die
I see that I have placed my trust in the reasonableness of others
Or at least in their attentiveness

I remember an occasion when Stevie Wonder
Performed Superstition on a television program
The host asked Stevie
Whether he himself were superstitious
To which with impressive patience the artist pointed out
That the lyrics state clearly
Superstition ain’t the way
I was shocked
First by the discourtesy of the question
For what decent person
Would admit publicly to so foul an acquired ignorance
But then I remembered that many disclose nay boast
That they act according to beliefs
Concerning bad luck ritual practices and the influence of demons
And my shock subsided into mere disapproval
Of the host’s inattentiveness
But here was an instance
Not of socially reprehensible acquired ignorance
But ignorance of the morally neutral
And one might say natural kind
The host has not learned to read a poem
And supposes it to be an unmediated statement of the poet’s beliefs
I’m always amused when people approvingly quote Shakespeare
Without noticing apparently that the words were spoken
By a rascal a fool a naïf or a villain
And this poem begins Very superstitious
And withholds the identity of the one
To whom superstition is attributed
And many of the words are devoted to
Cataloguing without immediate comment
Various superstitious beliefs
Such as the bad luck accruing to the baby
Who broke the looking glass
And perhaps the host was a more sophisticated listener
Than I supposed
For the refrain insists that
When you believe in things that you don’t understand
You’re going to suffer
And theists Christians among them
Profess to believe in things they don’t understand
And rather than dismiss their beliefs as superstitious
Celebrate the prevalence of supernatural forces on earth
They refuse to acknowledge the contradiction
Between belief in bad luck
And the suffering that the song warns
Follows upon superstition
Reason requires that one or the other
Is the truth

So it comes down to the problem of truth and poetry
Of which there are two separate problems
The first
The disparity of truth and statements of truth
I speak not of now
The second
The disparity of objective and subjective truth
Constitutes my current theme
Now nothing literally nothing
Is more obnoxious that the statement of a falsehood
With the smug disclaimer
Well it’s true for me
As if the sum of 7 and 5 varies from person to person
Or one could wish away the fact of slavery
It is nevertheless reasonable to observe
That different people react differently
To the objective and the social worlds we all share
Partly because ignorance is always infinite
But isn’t wonderful to say I don’t know once in awhile
And partly because emotional responses are unpredictable
And poets prize the inner life
A character flaw no doubt
A narcissistic pretext for the display of prowess
And some emotions are perfectly accordant to reason
As when we mourn the loss of a loved one
But other emotions were better never having been
Which I will not delineate here
But only will I say read Gut before reading Desert
And it is craven paranoia
Not to say authorial arrogance
For me to claim that those who have expressed approval of my work
Do so for a motive that I deem a bad reason
For they may well be more sophisticated readers
Than I have supposed
Nevertheless
Why this scandalous poem before all the others
When I know each of them to have established an occasion
For considerable practical difficulty

And the great practical difficulty is to express feeling
Not merely to name or pantomime feeling
A game of charades or a general knowledge contest
Not that the expression of feeling is everything
And poems can do many things but always in the key of feeling
But indeed
And this is no doubt another flaw of character
The poet revels in rhetoric
And worse the mere nonsense of sound
Such as the assonance of revels in rhetoric
Or perhaps since alliteration also obtains
Only half-assonance
And the ecstasy of effrent as when
Cirt lignes sid konaist lagnap
Moreover the rhetorical strategy
No more than the phonological and indeed typographical atmosphere
Is never calculation but always strives toward
Truth to imagination
So not always but often irony bespeaks rage
Not the most admirable of feelings
And one resorts unconsciously to irony
When the straightforward truth is too horrible for statement
As to react to the belief
That it is not enough for the virtuous to prosper
For also the wicked must suffer
And painful death and the overpowering dread
That accompanies death
Are not enough and therefore
The wicked must suffer unimaginable physical agony
Even after the dissolution of the body
And all are wicked
All all deserve to die
There I did it again
And I would that I could wish away The Inferno
And the Middle Ages and Western Culture
The rage of Achilles and the health of Gregor Samsa’s sister
And how dare I deny
The glories of a civilization that also produces garbage
As humans necessarily must
But it is our lot to make art out of garbage
As Rauschenberg did
The muddy mess of inner being