Gate of Heavenly Peace

Three more days, and we had to turn to the

other

Side of the world. There, too, perineum tore,

Lips wrenched, head crowned. China, that country

No song can cage--can prayer reach so far?--China, too.

Set down names, already chimes on the wind,

Traces on wood: Li Peng, Fang Lizhi, Hu Yaobang,

Wang Dan, Zhao Ziyang, Hou Dejian,

Xiao Bin, Ziao Hongliang, Li Jinghua,

And you, Chai Ling, on whose girl's shoulders fell

The leaden tread of revolution, who tried to think her way

Through to the Best of Ways, whose courage made her Commander in

Chief,

Defend Tienanmen Square Committee. At first, like Christ,

You refused . . . ill with conscience, you stood, resisted

revolts in the

Ranks, intrigues, cliques against claques. When some ran,

You called stand; when some said negotiate, you cried

firm.

When everyone ran or was gunned down, you took to the radio

Calling on all in ancient language to shed blood for

China.

Later, some would say, She was the reason

So many died. Others would say, She was our soul.

Chai Lin, you live far from China now,

And I wonder how your conscience is. Does memory sear you,

Or do you think China grew fertile beneath the bloodshowers?

So many times you hesitated, but each time, clown and priestess,

You took the cup, the blame, the chance, the leap, the joke.

Oldsters

stymied on high in China. Bullhorn chorus,

Underground choir of mimeo posters, unauthorized flyers,

(Othello's unauthorized kisses), rumor a lucifer spurting

In a dynamite of anything. Millions and millions of bicycles,

bicyclists,

Students,

jeans,

shades,

rock 'n' roll.

Police scuttled them,

They were coming 4/20

from everywhere,

drunk with risk, as deer

Edge to drink at the dwindling pond where alligators cluster and

Wait for the margin to drag their prey within jawstrike. Thirst

against

Instinct,

innocents venture closer to the alligator heart,

The Forbidden City, Square of Heavenly Peace, gate of the

Imperial Palace, where Mao had declared the People's Republic.

And while innocents approached, that very week, Gorbachev 4/25

Scraped fat clots from Russia's arteries: hardliners

Out of the Central Committee. No time to recover: two

Days later, millions filled Tienanmen Square.

Hu Yaobang shouted all day long to

Deaf warlords in council. His list of China's evils

Hour after hour brought a question: What do you have to say to

us?

Hu: We are failing the people of China. Next morning, his heart

Went black.

Four thousand students, coals glowing at a breath, placed

A banner for Hu, Soul of China, on the Martyrs' Monument.

At his funeral, fifty thousand, first wave, danger-drunk.

Boycott classes; call for talks. TV and the People's Daily

(Warlord ventriloquism) lashed out.

One hundred and fifty thousand

(Ventricle at diastole) marched;

five hundred thousand

Watched. Numbers, numbers. This place is good to speak of

The failure that changed China, those who believed too much.

May 1, national holiday, passed with students

Mortifying old men, spitting on their lie of order:

May said spring meant sorrow-too-long.

Tienanmen Square crested, a China within a China.

Old men who would win swore and wrangled.

I need a breathing time between prayer and crippling denial inChina …

Return to China,

to May 4,

when seventy years

Before, students had arisen. Thousands, thousands, thousands.

Deafness on the dais. Fight, then, with famine, a few

Tents in Tienanmen, bikes, flags, buses spraypainted

With reasons for hunger. A mild bay ripple, a few

Hundred kids in the Cyclops eye of all humanity.

Sacrilege: resolute starvation in the Square and everybody saw,

Including Gorbachev, visiting China to renew relations,

Smiling with Raisa and Deng Xiaoping, squat and deaf.

Czechoslovakia: 5/17

they let Havel go. More dangerous

To jail poetry than let it out into the open where you can watch

it.

They said You can leave now

if you just sign here;

Thanks, he said, but no. Trap versus tact.

And so, in the comedy that the tragedy had become, they

let him walk.

Poetry out in the open. Memory. It was all over.

In Beijing, 5/18

Wuer Kaixi, dauntless boy, shouted at

Li Peng an hour on TV. What are you trying

To tell us? didn't work on TV. 5/20-22

Orders to clear out. Starvers refused. Beatings, ambulances.

The Army marched out of the Great Hall of the People and found

The people ready to reason with them, gently resisting.

The Army sat and the people sat, had singing contests:

"The Three Disciplines and Eight Points of Attention";

"Without the Communist Party, There Will Be No New China"--

Respect sidled past impatience and squatted, uneasy, with irony;

Toward evening the Army marched back to the Great Hall of the

People.

The tent city where the stomach caved grew tenfold,

And a million people, the second wave, came in from the provinces

by

Train, got lifts to the Square on student motorbikes, student

Trucks, red flags waving, students believing, unripe

Fruit hanging. …

Heart attack

in China:

expulsion of all moderates from government 5/26

(the students should have

Run right then: crocodiles were stirring,

But thirst, thirst), and the chances of hundreds in Tienanmen

Square

Would die . . .

but how could they know that when they all

had fallen in love?

From a magazine cover

her face subdued me--the future's woman,

All colors seduced to tan; full eyes tapered;

Veldt walker, ice woman, boglander, tropics mother,

Their histories in her lips, taste, sense of surrounds.

She is, though I see her every day on the streets, not here yet

But a gantlet's end of time, change. You might well call her

Goddess of Freedom, sculpt her from blank plaster 5/30

As they did at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, tricycling her

In sections to Tienanmen Square. Put her together, artists,

Styrofoam, wood, East, West, windblown, clutching

A torch with left hand and right. Every newspaper in the

world

Renewed her eyeless stare at Mao Zedong's portrait

Outraged in the sacred square. She, standing there, had five

Days to live. Crowds took on body around her, washed around

her

Feet. She, they locked, as key and receptor

Lock and the nexus changes in conformation,

Opens into new possibilities, she their sperm and they her

Zona pellucida. Lock: division, division, division

Along a relay of charge and exchange culminating in being.

Electric words of new things in China flew among them,

Sin of belief committed in the open. CNN, ABC,

NBC, CBS, BBC, CBC carried it everywhere,

A white shirt dazzle, students in dance of thrilled

suspense,

And what a shock. I was almost afraid to see it.

Change like this meant my world was dying. I tasted the old man's

Resentment at the future, his world taken away bit by bit--

Only a moment. A prayer was being answered, reply so complex that

Each thing was its opposite: these kids and their naive Woodstock

Awaited their massacre and triumph. The People's Army, even now

gathering and

Following orders, would slaughter them, end the old China.

For days after they built the Goddess, 5/30-6/2

dumb freeze among the leaders.

Uprisings were rumored in cities in the dusty, irretrievable

distance.

A farmer cudgeled the publicans who dared to tax his pigs.

Hydraulic pressure: people streaming into Beijing, soldiers,

Police, animals, cameras (the eye stayed open) squaring

Inversely as the volume. China had held its breath for centuries.

Bursting lungs. Deer were drinking. Bold and on camera

(Tribunals watched the western shows to learn whom to kill),

Students lectured the government, waved books, and sang.

Police trucks wheeled about the streets. A few arrests.

Street merchants on motorbikes--they called themselves the Flying

Tigers--

Rode in and out of Beijing, reporting the movement of troops.

Both the mountain and

its shadow, 6/2

now the Army was assembling and

Rolling into the bursting town. They came to murder their

Countrymen if ordered. Encountered human walls, reaching out,

Calling them brother, reminding them of history.

Hands pulled soldiers down from the trucks, embraced, beat them;

Soldiers looked on with dead faces, wept with shame, begged.

Farmers, workers, laborers lay down in front of the trucks.

The people made an obstacle course out of the city,

Stole buses, trucks, cars, blocked the arteries.

A human whitewater surged at the trucks. People and soldiers

Stared. Stalled. Ache. Aura of unease. Rumors of

Tanks.

A mobile earthquake rolled. (Fear works,

Force works. Both turned billions to marionettes

Waving red books. But the sting rips out the guts

of the

Stinger.) Blind as steel, the slow smash scraped

Aside the flattened bodies, auto corpses, burned-out

Wreck of resistance, probed, battered, ruined its way toward

the

Square. Thousands ran. Warnings chattered on loudspeakers.

The world press was harangued onto airplanes, the eye of the

world

Thumbed. Thousands stayed in the Square of Heavenly Peace.

Rumbles: a moraine of nightmare nights shoved ahead of the

Tanks. Machine guns squeezed off hundreds of lives as they

Came. The Square drained. Thousands ran screaming 6/4

Into the screaming streets, the screaming guns, the hospitals,

jails, their

Futures over. Some escaped. China ended its

History in cowardice. What else is a tank? I can't hear you,

I can't see you, I am all decision, swivel, steel.

You win and must be punished.

Look at what they did.

Or, rather, we can't look. We'll never see this clearly.

Some say the army and the students dickered the night,

And when dawn came, they let the few remaining wander

Home, to be arrested, tried, and erased later.

Some say that blood obeys the mass of the earth:

Two hundred students sat, some believing, some unbelieving,

Betrayed and ready in the Square. An ambient roar of

Metal injustice muffled them up. A warning of warnings.

They could have dragged them away, roped them, gassed them, but

the comedy was,

Having bludgeoned their way thus far, they had to butcher.

In a vicious absurdity of deployment, fifty riflemen knelt in

their

Sight. Twenty paces. The old men thought

Nobody saw the next, but a Spanish camera crew

Got it. There is a word the newspapers use: atrocity.

From far away, the Spanish cameras caught the silence, the

Final warning, the order. Crack. A first row fell,

Were taken away. Another warning, order, crack--

Took away everything, turned a hopeful, fearful being to a

Slopped protein sack. Crack--brainflower, spasm,

Afterimage. Despair of a state: fire into the crowd.

Some say thirty died. Some say three hundred. It doesn't

Matter. They cleared the Square, and the unreason, the purge

began: the

Spreading green stain of the Army went after anybody,

Stabbed and strafed the night, gunning the alleys, invading the

Houses, torching the blocks. Some soldiers ran into

Traps. Their people caught them, beat them, hanged them, beheaded

them,

Burned them, and fled. Mao's China was over, but before the

Corpse stiffened up, the reflex kick would kill.

Unspeakable night in city and country, the People's Army

Raping past and future with sick fury of defeat,

Glutting the prisons, crippling the gallows, getting back on

Top--tracers in darkness--scattered fires--anonymous

Anguish--who were they who died, cornered, shadowed,

Smothered, drowned, slit? When will a song tell

Their last seconds? When no one stops praying?

In the wasteful, indifferent attention with which all prayer is

answered,

Next dawn, the sun over China was a juddering bag of plasma.

If

history

is built in how we imagine,

how we pay out

Lines to one another--to bind, to rescue--

Then prayer is answered in both dream and act, in every

Soul that ever lived and in its wake, not only

Some aggregate backmind but also its dragnet of ricochets,

From first lightfall in the clearing of the infant mind. Answer

Is asymptote, replying though withdrawing though nearing though

deflecting.

Our lives are not a passage of moments we happen to own

But brim with other lives lived otherwise. We kiss and grieve

Along chains billions long. We send all beyond us;

No oblivion. More than us remembers. Live

As though each act were rapt in the utter radiosity of cause.

I think he lived like that,

the pedestrian,

the one who seemed

Just crossing the road,

intent on getting to work, mindless of the

Column of tanks leaving the stifled heart of Beijing. But

See: in mid-jaywalk

he seemed to come to,

midstreet,

Turn to face his brother the tank, which bore a space of

Roar and desolation toward him (behind it, fifty more) and

He was

enough to stop them.

He stood, he

reasoned,

would not

Let them go.

I would sing your name

If any knew it. When all was gunfire, you said, Brother,

Tell me, why did it happen?, asking the world's question.

Tanks stalled, column halted, you reasoned.

That was the year, man and tank, men in machines.

You would move on, the year roll like tanks, but before your

Friends dragged you away, your need to know halted armies.

Nineteen eighty-nine crested in that conversation,

The fallible embrace of words asking tanks why,

Word whizzing into the universe, receding down the

Chain of excuses. I know what he asked, but I can't hear the

answer.

My passions are Changan Avenue gagged with motors and corpses.

My will is millions rioting in the flash-lanced night; my drives

are what

Happens to voices, limbs, when there is nothing to believe,

Breathe, be, when love is the light of a vanished nebula.

Know this: We are afraid history makes sense,

Afraid of human goodness and its awkward burden of love.

You who stood and reasoned with tanks, I thank you for reminding

me.

That was the first forepang of the climactic change, which has

come

Gradually, feminine climax, these six years and more.

Mao, 1996

wake up.

Money-making rides the bicycles.

China is

Connecting to the world it could always imagine away before.

A grip has relaxed, though coercion still whips its steel tail.

Each Tienanmen anniversary, the Square is hustled closed.

Protest? People know better. You'd have to be crazy. Make money.

Why risk everything when change goes on by itself? Grief

Not yet cooled for the blasted children of the uprising. Many

Farm in distant prisons. Some fled West, where they

Shiver in the strangeness. Others pull their China over their

heads.

Why, still grieving, heap more grief?

Why not

make money?

Does

history

have any

meaning?

That depends.

Is meaning

More like mass and entropy, or more like lust or hunger?

More like angles of light, seducing with death in October,

Or more like Picasso's gaze at a woman before the stroke?

With consciousness, time, and language bent to the same axle,

We are meaning machines. As the spider pays out the ductile

Web to rig the bough, as the owl prowls night

Territory, brilliant in his domain, as walls of river bulk up to

the

Edge of Niagara and plummet in a choiceless roar,

meaning--

This constant narrator, this portable audience--is what we do,

Our tropism, our green turning toward the light.

No madwoman in chains in prison, no genius corseted in libraries,

No one stands outside the

unsilenceable. Like the electrical wave

That readies the heart for each beat, what has ever happened

Replays in billions of hearts, washing over the world.

(Nothingness is not what we face.

We face the multifarious

Jugglery of the real, the multiverse, its choir of throats.)

I can see why anyone, faced with the story as it is,

Would retire to their lives, say, Isn't this--haven't we done--

Enough? Not this too. Who could

Live so mindful? Live all lives as our own

When our own are so hard to catch? Isn't history one more

suffering,

One more wave of noise, envelope requesting cash?

Where's our shovel? Give us a corner of shade for digging.

The suburbs are the organized denial of history, but

even there

We seamsters--desire the needle, memory the thread--are

Making a Joseph's coat of meaning to wear in the world.

Time and mind and history are made of the same material,

One another. (Geese fly, locked in flock

Consciousness: one dips, all dip.)

Watching that year on TV, I learned among the ghosts:

Time whispers, without a whence or a whither, its many whys.

History is our time-lapse film, of how branches branch, how they

Arborize, dendritify. Watching the movie, we want the movie.

Remembrance waters desire, and up springs that sunflower,

longing.

A man turns into a hound alone at night with the moon,

A woman to a jilted photograph mourning the desertion of color.

My son was Christ. Each one of us came out of Egypt--

Not that the past builds up to us, or that we are the answer,

But that we stand in relation, and know better when we

triangulate.

History comes to tell us this: our lives

mean in

Chaoses giving rise to the play of relations. A.R. Ammons

I'm no

Expert. Maybe loss, the sea, the stars, town seen from a

mountaintop,

Are strangers everywhere in the universe except the storyteller

mind.

Or maybe all things are related, and all we do is say so. But

In the space and time of history, minds change, you know. They

Did in Wenceslas Square, the Kremlin, Tienanmen,

Brandenburg

Gate.