The Chardonnay Grapes of Wrath

$85 billion of real U.S.-backed Monopoly money to bail out an overextended insurance company whose profitable divisions thrive on denial or minimization of pleas(e) from the sick. I try to think of all those claims agents and brokers as some kind of giant sector of pity-worthy labor involved in paperwork, much as steel men were once involved in iron. But I quickly add a 'y' to the word 'iron.' These are not coal miners. These are willing servants of the bottom line and a profit extracted from the unfelt suffering of others. Their bosses are the binge drinkers and eaters of wealth--the big daddies--who have to explain once again to the family why and how their excess has led to emptiness in the cupboard and leftovers at the dining room table.

Suddenly, this morning Wall Street is an Appalachia of financial ruin and the money meisters know that the only trickle-down will be blood--possibly theirs (one can hope, can't one), which is the only collective--of misery--they know. Profit is theirs; loss is ours. I have decided Wealth is Wrath--Kali wrath--when it is concentrated in so few hands. Money is a false now, incapable of adding the essential prefix letter 'k'. To be in the true Now is to be in the true Know. Only the poor denied access to that wealth can imagine the poverty caused by its inequity and then forge and maintain a recalcitrant brotherhood--an involuntary but acutely sensed now--in its midst. Maybe I'm a romantic but it strikes me that we have only generations of poor bereft of a history of labor or a stake in any shared, common dignity of work. We are reduced to a glittering, painful purpose of survival--hard, rocky ground for nobility.

I'm in the third week of a Ramadan spending fast. I am indulging in the most appropriate of starvations because it has no end time for the entire month. You don't break this fast--or, if you do, you do so at your own peril. How do I convert the time spent honoring Ramadan into a harvest of balance that can be practiced day-in, day-out?

In this Ramadan mood, I watched "Grapes of Wrath" last night. It was an awkward two hours; Hollywood trying to commiserate with the mobs of itinerant poor to its north and south. I had difficulty believing Henry Fonda, and I never had that difficulty before. When I was younger and he proclaimed the spirit of the poor and the working man would be everywhere, there was earnestness suffused in his face. In the past, I thought it was a man merging with his words--words of prophecy that were as credible as they were necessary. But last night, it seemed a trick of light(ing).

The truth is this: The plutocrats aren't worth a second of time or an inch of space in any sane man's cosmology. So here is a poem from the time when we mourned the losses of and the impossible odds against the poor and the workers in this country--and our tears were real and copious because the suffering was still our own. Here's a poem by Ed Dorn, Robinson Jeffers' industrial double in bitterness and broken-heartedness--and the compassion those strange defiant virtues protect when they serve as corridor-pacing muses for a poetics. The final salutation of this poem/letter is, for me, one of the greatest moments in the history of poetry:

" . . . go letter,
keep my misery close to theirs
associate me with no other honor."

Now please read the full poem and earn this moment in its crying fullness.

MOURNING LETTER, MARCH 29, 1963

No hesitation
would stay me
from weeping this morning
for the miners of Hazard Kentucky.
The mine owners'
extortionary skulls
whose eyes are diamonds don't float
down the rivers, as they should,
of the flood

The miners, cold
starved, driven from work, in
their homes float though and float
on the ribbed ships of their frail
bodies,

Oh, go letter,
keep my own misery close to theirs
associate me with no other honor.

--Ed Dorn, The Collected Poems 1956-74, Four Seasons Foundation, 1975