#273

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Racist in a couple directions. This is once again comparing Henry in his privations and sufferings with the plight of African slaves: “Survive—exist—who is at others’ will / optionless; may gelded be, be put to stud / and were sweating sold; / was sold.” Aside from the reappearance of the castration business which I wearied of instantly way back eight or nine months ago, even worse is the comparison with slave experience, which, given the awfulness of slaves’ suffering from back in those Antebellum days, strikes me as always as way more presumptuous than I’ll ever be willing to swallow. It’s worse than that: The dude should have known better. I don’t care if it was the 1960s, when the great social revolutions were only just taking hold. B. sometimes gets credit in the literary scholarship circles for speaking in the hip young dialect of the Counterculture, but he holds on to much of the Establishment down deep. He’s just not a very wealthy or powerful example, and no real establishment figure, corporate or government, gray suit or blue, would have given him the time of day. Credit where credit’s due, he’s on solid Countercultural ground regarding war and Vietnam, but women on the whole are mainly good for certain delightful and shame-inducing things (though if they’re famous poets then that takes precedence and he’ll make an exception), and his appropriation of Black culture doesn’t hold up much better fifty years on than Jim Crow, Apartheid, and slavery itself if you ask me. So there’s that.

Then there’s Middle Eastern peoples and oil. “Come closer, Sambo. I planting in your face / ilex.” “Sambo” is ironic, and I’m afraid that I suspect the phrase sand-n____r is somewhere behind it. Ilex is holly, which has associations with Christianity because the thorny leaves recall the crown of thorns placed on Jesus’s head, and the red berries are symbolic of drops of his blood. I think there are other mythical associations that go further back to the Romans and Celts both, but B. is all about the Christian symbol as an aggressive affront to Islam here, in context of the oil it controls. Having your face shoved in a bunch of ilex would be extremely unpleasant at best. But I think that the word “optionless” still hovers over this. Oil addicted, we have no choice but to do as we’re told by the controllers of the stuff. We’re owned by the oil’s owners. Texas, “bigoty Texas,” which still had some oil left in the 60s, compares with Bahrein on the same grounds—driving Cadillacs, thinking they’re special.

I’m not quite sure what to make of the ending: “Muscle my whack. We gotta trickle. Seize / them Moslem testicles, and pull. Please / hurt my owner twice.” Well, I’m not sure I want to make anything of it, actually. It’s almost as if pulling those testicles will hurt, sure, but maybe like milking a cow it’s a way to get the oil flowing faster. They’re the balls of the owners, though. What slave hasn’t fantasized about hurting his owner, probably in ways unspeakable? This poem doesn’t walk the line of even half-decent propriety, it crosses thirty feet over it, but that being said, B. knows the score when it comes to who’s really calling the shots in the world. Oil owns us. I don’t like it either. But the energy and money in oil for the past century now has been too tempting. Climate change is as far down the oil-addict’s road as delirium tremens is for the alcoholic’s, but we’ve gotten there. The choice is a radical life change, AA, some 12-step program or another, or else we keep drinking the stuff because we have to and then we jump off a bridge when it’s finally clear the addiction is final and there’s no way back. It owns us once and for all.