Action in History

It was an impossible plane in that world. . . Men believed in him.

W.C.W.

The ground is moving

Beneath him    it moves

With him        

With his changing

Changes          come

Into being        from formality

This is not new

Nor uncommon           but

Phenomenal    and fantastic

It is freedom of a real sort      

Well documented        and      making it-

self       continually creating    problems

For itself          in the environment of its making

For being freely made             it encounters

Its constitution                       a being in the new world

From a series of steps

A place            freedom

after     itself

Hence              there are duels

Challenges among the freed men

The loose and the dead

Whose outcomes we expect

Little of           but care greatly for

See the articulation!    How previously made             how little remains

But the structure!        The sound

Of history beating      becoming meaning

In meaningful ways

“O’ he was just mean”           they say

“His smile betrayed it all”     the niceties

and the women            “did you see him with his daughter?”

“They were too close”                        they say

“Its unnatural to love her as he did                and his wife”

—how beautiful                      “she bore a scar”        with her child

All this                        the charm

To explain the charm             

Away               always

For a killer in a fair fight        

Can’t be beat while fighting   or waking

For that matter           the world folds to such men

Even as their shape erodes

Taking with it everything       but a vigor

That matters   most

Only by omission       in fact              can such men be beat

The trade secret                      of a narrative now long          

Since decommissioned            the excavation beginning                    continuing here

As it has                     elsewhere

In other times              revealing

The striations of our time’s founding

Aaron Burr

Aaron Burr

Aaron Burr

The affixing of movement       a

Point when all were not          but

Some were       really   now famously so

Aaron Burr

Aaron Burr

Aaron Burr

II.

Think of Sade             removed

By a letter       publicly

Defeated         

His persistence           Paz’s volcano

The extremity of         his furor

 Its appropriate           enactment

In writing        by

Writing            coming

About              around him

In         Vincennes

In         the Bastille

In         Charenton

Following him                         loving him

Like a sister-in-law                 or manservant

Latour with                             under the Spanish fly

Only then                    right

After aphrodisiacs       right

Could he control         even his own nature

And even then             right

A foundation               right

In our world                right

His libertinage                        was he not

Already one                 before making

Himself                       others one

Hadn’t it already been           purchased       

Before Rose Keller                  her remarkable trait

Of not doing that                    for

Some things just can’t be bought      

From some                  so others

Must be made            

His freedom    then

As before         subject

To no one but itself

In         Vincennes

In         the Bastille

In         Charenton

Sade wrote the revolution

Before and after          it happened

Whether it listened      or not

Ears are the last of the sensual text’s concerns

As materials other than

Meals, wine and paper           to document were his

Ours now                    his writing

Its not rebellion           not peering outside its grounds

Nor indifferent to its creation             a real tragic thing

Thus something else   some

Part written for abundance     present

Materials        not a lack of others

He brought them

He consumed them     like never before

He made himself         what he was