Would it have been so bad? Probably they would
have gotten tired of our candy-ass ways
and gone back to Germany—the Mongolians asked
the Bolsheviks for help in 1921, but after the Reds
sent troops to beat back the Chinese, they oppressed
their hosts until they got tired of it and left, meaning
that everybody in Mongolian today is Mongolian again,

not Russian and certainly not Chinese. We'd have
had to speak German for a couple of years, but then
we'd all be bilingual, wouldn't we? We'd be fully
globalized and ready to do business with our new
friends, the Germans. Okay, you'd have to put Hitler
to one side, but isn't that what poetry's for? Kokoschka
was admitted into the same art school the future

Führer applied to, but 'unfortunately Hitler failed
the exam. If I had failed in his place, the world would
have been spared a good deal of misery," said the artist;
"Hitler would have become a bad painter, and I should
have become a reasonable, understanding politician."
Hitler would have ended up giving lessons to schoolkids,
muttering about foreigners in cafés, and showing in

a friend's gallery every few years, if he'd had a friend.
Oh, poetry, why can't you make all this happen?
You're part words, part music; can't you draw a crowd
with your pipes and timbrels and then talk sense
into them? Don't tell Music I said so, but you're better
than it. Hitler's goons listened to Beethoven as they built
their death camps and marched the people into them.

They should have listened to Rossini: when you listen
to Beethoven, says a character in Gravity's Rainbow,
all you want to do is invade Poland, but with Rossini,
the lovers unite, isolation is overcome, walls are breached,
balconies scaled—listen! "The Italian girl is in Algiers,"
he says, "the Barber's in the crockery, the magpie's
stealing everything in sight!" In the midst of greed,

pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs;

shit is turned into gold, and the whole world
rushes together. Poetry does that, too, only not in big concert halls.

Poetry, you're a woman reading in a chair by firelight;
you're reading Yeats, how Love paces the mountains
and hides his face amid the stars, and you pause
to put another log on the fire and go back

to your book. Or you're a man in Paris waiting for
the waiter to bring his coffee, or you're two lovers
in a meadow—you're certainly not an auditorium bursting with thugs
in their death's-head uniforms and their brittle
wives. Oh, you remember war: the Iliad is more or less
a training manual for that pastime. But a better poem is the Odyssey
with its wily hero, at once wise and arrogant,

like, well, pretty much everybody. Or the way most of us
think of ourselves, at least. Serb poet Vasko Popa says poetry
is not written by lovesick teenagers but by sly old tricksters.
You go from house to house in every neighborhood, poetry,
from table to table, field to field. You don't say, "Stop killing!"
to the people. You don't say anything, really. When I read
you, I don't want to kill anyone, though I guess someone

could kill me as I weep and chuckle, totally engrossed.
Okay, anonymous assassin, cut it out! Go kill
somebody else! Wait, don't kill anybody. Here, read this poem,
it's by Schiller, Goethe, Heine, Rilke, some little girl
who doesn't even know she's a poet yet. Okay, Astrid
or Gretchen or Dagmar or whatever your name is, let's see
what you've written. Hey, not bad for a kid! Keep it up.