TIBET
(low yellow Renaissance towers
frame
mood of Cerulean blue
or copper overlaid with blue plate
Sympathetic to the sweet cypresses
a whale rises from the blue fumes forming a cloud
the mayors of the respective towns are out parading
A crowd gathers, passing the bottle around
some standing in a long curving line.
Some are talking
the waves, etc.
the bigger the better—
The troops are departing by boat
I can see them
but think of myself—
as better than nature
There is nothing of the Cliff House worth noting.
The polypus behind me feels like a cancer—
sinews connecting
muscles of the
The odd sun shines elsewhere
on a world of republics
the men and women who built them
as any sickness of the remote.
Each penetration of the earth by the sun
is a point on the map
solved by four colors
in the mind’s eye a virgin Iris and her way.
But I, enstatic
a clean plain
at endless altitude
inside the color brown
am formally known as
the indifference.
footnote to
Tibet is thinking
China is nature
China is the Manifest
Dream of Tibet
Now China is the Air Force
and Tibet is the air for flight
Now China is the air
and Tibet is the ether
Now China is the ether
and Tibet is the air—
What about this
suppression of Tibet?
Barrett Watten
from Opera—Works (Bolinas, Calif.: Big Sky, 1975)
reprinted in Frame (1971–1990) (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1997)
Copyright © Barrett Watten 1975, 1997, 2008
Barrett Watten, reading
