Once I had a girlfriend who lived in the Bronx.
I got lost whenever I visited her.
I vaguely remember her neighborhood,
a resplendent boulevard built to welcome
Napoleon IV, Marshal Foch, General De Gaulle.
But it received instead my urgent lust,
leading me astray in the seven hills
not of rambling Rome
and the conspiratorial Tiber
but of a less noted waterway, the Bronx River,
already submitting to sludge and squalor.
I never found memorable landmarks.
The Bronx looked like so many other places
in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, too.
But the people were calm and untroubled.
It was a little while after one of the wars...
Big II? No, Korea! So I exaggerated.
So it wasn’t a war.
We’ve coined new phrases to describe not-a-war,
at least since World War II.
Thus public approval continues
for legitimate bombardments.
Afterwards, our puppeteers again mishandled
the strings that make the public dance
to a more appealing prosperity.
So we don’t call it war, no more, no more...
We don’t call it war, no... more...
Police action. Protective intervention.
Preventive strike. Pre-emptive attack.
Far East, Middle East, Near East...
So many ways to say we’ll bomb you.
I could go on, but you get my drift,
or you might as well depart,
’cause you won’t appreciate the rest.
I never noticed while I searched for my girlfriend
how many old people lived in the Bronx.
For the youngsters came home from World War II,
married their girls, packed their bags,
kissed Ma and Pa goodbye
and went to college on the G.I. Bill,
followed by a class jump to lower middle,
paid for by good old Uncle Sacrifice
to reward their loyal service
with the first installment of the American dream.
So they got their degrees
and moved to Westchester and Long Island,
to new houses, lawns, two-car garages
filled with the latest consumer goods.
The Bronx was not for them.
While they were packing and moving out,
marooning Mom and Pop in oversize apartments
no longer rattled by arguments and growing pains,
distant political agitators
in San Juan and San Turce
were stirring credulous Puerto Ricans
with dazzling tales of streets of gold
waiting for them in New York City.
And where did they settle?
Can’t you guess? The Bronx.
So out with the old,
in with the unprepared for city life,
unassisted by family, government, union:
the Hispanic migration.
Instead of welcoming the newcomers to our shores
with jobs, education, assistance in urban living,
once again we betrayed our immigrants,
but this time better than ever before.
Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, Italians, Jews —
however low they seemed to America’s owners —
were more acceptable than Black, Hispanic, or Asian,
despite the pledge of life, liberty and the pursuit of...
After all, the less we look like our masters...
Once I had a girlfriend who lived in...
I no longer remember her name.
Oh, I almost forgot to tell you:
While Puerto Ricans were pouring off the planes,
Blacks were torrenting off the buses,
stiff and creaky from the long ride
from Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, too.
Driven out not by Goth, Hun, Zulu, Mongol horde,
but by farm machinery, by Deere, by Deere,
that rendered unnecessary until World War III
or Interplanetary War I
agriculture’s favorite utilities:
the bent human back, the grasping human hand.
And so they came to the Bronx, the Bronx,
as others before them had come, had come,
for jobs, homes, schools, a better life.
Does this sound unreasonable to you?
But, in the mid-nineteen-fifties,
it was unacceptable to most.
For in with the new, out with the old,
who galloped, drove, flew, trucked, punted, fled,
until the once comfortable neighborhoods,
abandoned by experienced city dwellers,
left groups of rural newcomers adrift,
on harsh, unfamiliar streets of decay.
Despite all the universities in the Bronx,
and law courts, and legislators,
constitutional guarantees lapsed,
inalienable rights were alienated.
I’ve almost forgotten the pleasures long ago
shared with my girlfriend in the Bronx.
I didn’t go back for twenty years.
What a change, citizens.
I had lived in Germany,
walked the ruins of World War II,
seen defeated ghosts of the Vaterland,
heard the laments of destruction,
met a madman, crooning for the lost Führer,
rushing crazed through Stuttgart streets,
chanting: “The bombs are fallen, Berlin is dead.
The bombs are fallen, Berlin is dead.”
What does this have to do with the Bronx?
Imagine that I made no gentle rediscovery
but found a biblical revelation.
Abandoned, burned, collapsed buildings
spreading rubble, refuse, riots,
on unresisting residents,
atoning their sins in urban purgatory.
Yet across the river,
on Sutton Place terraces,
comfortable observers counted the fires,
entertained by companions and cocktails,
while tenuous holds on life went up in flames.
But how the feasting in Sodom went on... went on...
and the pleasures of Gomorrah were many...
Separated from us by the palace guard...
The prosperous wallowed in indulgences,
refusing to receive supplicants,
a perilous subway ride removed.
Thy song, chanted for all of us:
Consume, consume... Waste, waste...
Burn, baby, burn...
Her house was buried under rubble
while the fires still smoldered
and extravagance burdened the people.
But who had declared war on the Bronx?
Did I miss the notice in The New York Times
that intelligently explained the invasion
or authorized high-altitude bombing?
Dresden, Hamburg, Nagasaki, ravaged cities,
welcome the Bronx, don’t say no thonx.
My visit was no voyage of atonement
or conquest or reclamation
but, arrested by these bleeding streets,
I was possessed by the wilderness
and compelled to serve the needy.
I saw visions that tortured my spirit:
murderous madhouses of anguish,
provided by the state, the state,
no different from Bedlams of Dark Ages.
Our prisons jammed, crammed full:
criminals, sinners, sufferers, babies
hidden from sight behind forbidding walls.
After my pilgrimage to American Institutions,
I recognized the style of government consent.
The children of the parents we would not help
were finally receiving some attention,
concealed from us by padlocked doors.
While outside those bitter caverns
where frightened children howl,
the non-war on crime, drugs, poverty,
and all the other social divertissimos,
that keep the media at peak employment,
constantly declare truce, amnesty, armistice,
whenever it’s time to go home to the suburbs.
Our schools are losing the spirit to struggle,
our leaders always have eloquent answers,
our churches are falling silent,
while multi-national corporations peddle our heritage.
Are we mortally wounded?
I think my girlfriend was crushed
beneath the wreckage of her house of dreams
in a once pleasant neighborhood
now submerged
somewhere in the Bronx.
