Joshua Weiner

Kennedy Center

Volume 8, Number 4, Fall 2007
The Evolving City Issue

Kennedy Center

Young boy of the Wushu
takes his turn in the demo
outdoors, tin knives trailing
bright scarves that cut clean
figures through air, the beat
of ten drums sending him gyro-
scoping, arms like chopper blades
spinning before they lift—so
even a boy younger than he
appreciates the stern concentration
gathering as he prepares
legs to kick higher than
his head snapping back
to lead the body that way in
the counter thrust. Five? Six?
A warrior-dancer tracing
nature of cobra and mongoose
in quick calligraphy of cloth.
Opposition in flight. Complements
finding space along
a single axis: Beijing
in Washington unfurling
a seam between art
and war in this bright chilly
memorial plaza running
from the Shaolin Temple
to a high brow “exchange”—
(Is that David Carradine
walking the sill in meditation
above Rock Creek Parkway?)
Thus, Grasshopper, hold in the mind
the life-size terra-cotta
warriors of First Emperor Qin,
two of eight thousand
upstairs encased in glass
ready to meet the enemy
on the eternal march to Heaven;
but it’s not Heaven, only
two levels higher than street
that the army copters
serving as V.P.-escort
angle along the river,
open doors framing the soldiers,
goggles and guns looking back
at us eye to eye, calculating
the shot between us, only
one instant in the new migration.
And our house too has its new
hero of his story, who wakes
from dream and gathers light-saber,
pirate knife, and jeweled rapier
to make the journey from mountain
peak to peaceful valley
where he lays his weapons
at the foot of our bed before
burrowing between us, first
light thin as a transparent
seam between here and there,
us and them; while
the great metal bird,
having heard the call,
touches ground behind
concrete ramparts
that nest permanently now
on the busy downtown streets
in the evitable yet already opened
next theater of operations.

 

Joshua Weiner is the author of three books of poems: The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish (2013), From the Book of Giants (2006), and The World’s Room (2001). He is the editor of a book of essays, At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn (2009, all books published by the University of Chicago Press), and the poetry editor at Tikkun magazine. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a 2014 fellowship from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, among others. A professor of English at the University of Maryland, he lives with his family in Washington DC. To read more by this author: DC Places Issue, Summer 2006; Five Poems, Summer 2007.