What is thought and felt, believed and dreamed, reflected on, the plot worked out in constant
depth, what isn’t, for the time being, being written is being worked on—how long will it be,
the one long poem? Tacitus’s Annals, its half- Virgilian lines—Kafka’s name on a report,
Risk Classification and Accident Prevention in Wartime—expansion of a tendentious language,
an ancient clarity overlaid. What is said is, objectively, measured by visual and auditory
standards of the street; as of last Wednesday, it’s said, two hundred six thousand,
six hundred three dead, estimated eighteen million displaced. How will it end—it won’t. Vast open-air,
mud-soaked camps, toxic water—no one can say cluster bombs aren’t real. What of my grandparents’
families in Lebanon, in Syria, what of my grandfather, dead for all but four…