Oppen at Altamont

Thrownness he calls it
And indeed “everyone
turned very sharply
into himself or herself.
Kind of a masturbatory
atmosphere.”

And the music—

something we had never
heard before though surely
it had been heard before
long ago “the songs…
are no one’s own”

Not his, surely not

his. In red and black
this medieval prince,
troubador of darkness,
self-appointed but
delegated—allow me
to introduce him as he
introduced himself

Easy as
pie? No!
because it
is witnessed
we witness
ourselves as
he witnesses
himself there
in the cutting
room

“obscured by their long hair they seem

to be mourning”
But this is not prophecy
“on the massive spike the song
 2

clangs”

A spike not
a knife though one
may lead inevitably
to the other

For one sees it in their eyes,

their homely faces
The girl cannot stop weeping
and the boy in the cap
looks up at him shaking his head
knowing that something has gone
terribly wrong

But to what degree

does one withdraw from the stage?
Oppen cancels his reading tour—
“woke up one night in the absolute certainty
that I could not do it…
cannot, cannot, perhaps particularly
with the expansion of voice in Numerous
I cannot make a Chatauqua of it,
cannot put myself so thoroughly INTO it,
like a Ginsberg.”

Who appears innocuous

however unleashing
energies comparable
to what we see
on the screen

Who once invited

the Angels to
a Dylan concert, calling
them “our outlaw
brothers of the
counterculture”

The roiling mass

and the naked woman
cannot be otherwise
than a Bacchante
her rounded flesh lifted
 3

up and set back into

the crowd by the Angels
whose chief looks on
at Jagger singing—
products and producers
of such powers

While the meditative man

confirms his failure
his victory in retreat
to “honorably keep
His distance
If he can.”

The populist caught

between the Old and New
past and present

The crowd, the “people”

organized by a vanguard
or newly individuated
always at risk
as power is unleashed

Jagger helpless onstage:

“If we are one
let’s show
we’re all one”

What, what,
we asked each other
on the way to the museum,
were they doing there?
“It was necessary to park
one’s car and walk a mile.
Nobody looked at my wife and me”
Yet how odd they must have seemed
to any of the festive youth
unstoned and thoughtful
there among “the irrigation
canals” “walking under the high-
tension wires over the brown hills”

And Charlie Watts,

backbone of the band,
stares out in reverie,
 4

murmuring of the way

the Angels cleared the path
to the stage

Only much later

are we shown
the biblical painting
the crowd parting
as the bikes roar through

In the computer’s freeze-frame

it seems like Oppen’s
migratory vision
“the wounds untended
and the voices confused”
turned to nightmare

At the press conference in

some uncharted space
between naiveté and cynicism
Jagger speaks of “a sort
of microcosmic society
which sets an example to
the rest of America
as to how one can behave
in large gatherings.”

Yet for Oppen too

“The Students Gather”:
“I too agree
We are able to live
Only because some things have been said”

But who would not hesitate

to speak
knowing all
speech may be corrupted?

To identify death
with a kind of ecstasy
so that the crowd
takes over in a darkness
closely akin to joy

Words lost
in what he knew to be
 5

an endangered, dangerous
show

Not “the shuffling of a crowd”

nor the ball game’s argument
not even Williams’ crowd
seen as “beautiful,” “venomous”
“deadly, terrifying”

“I know, of course I know, I can enter no other place”

II

The space of possibility

is always limited:
the past is
because it has been
insofar as we
have been thrown
insofar as we
are fallen
insofar as we
may project ourselves
forward

Always at some point

they are running
from or toward
the helicopters

The Stones and

their entourage
lifted up and away
from disaster

Or the fall of Saigon

reenacted endlessly
in a musical

Troopers playing
the same old songs

Oppen feels the wind

 6

blowing through the century

The Collected Poems arrives—
the Angel of History in a cardigan
at the end of the continent
dissolving into language

And that sickening acceleration

that no poem may stop

No arbitrary freeze-frame
neither the Maysles nor mine
can prevent this passage

Poised to leave
Jagger stares out at us forever

Let him go

The storm kicks up

the credits roll

We almost expect to see them

walking back toward the car