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A Nice Place to Live
This summer, as the missiles went back and forth
between the one sobbing angry country and the other,
I went from the shallow end to the deep end,
my evening laps at the public pool,
wondering if there was something wrong with me
for not hating anyone that much.
Not the guy in the Hummer
who cut me off at the exit yesterday,
then gave me the finger.
Not my father, even in my worst moments.
Not even my ex-wife.
I’m a hater from the bush leagues, a small-time hater,
although I have, it’s true, gotten myself
through some long patches of self-pity
more or less on hatred alone.
Then I forget. Lose interest.
It’s called being white
and well-off in America,
where it’s all just handed to you
by a nice brown server with no English,
or a white person with bad teeth
and no dental plan.
And the gravy train is just so smooth
that when the big ideas—the ones
you would have died for, or even killed for,
the ones that take root and flower
only in the harshest desert climes,
wither inside you and die and turn to little figs
at the edge of your plate,
and you don’t even like figs—
then it’s time for a stroll down to Murphy’s
and a couple of beers with Roger
under the evening news.
And tonight it’s a weeping bearded man
holding the tailfin of a rocket
that killed his son,
a rocket made by all of us
sitting here at the bar tonight,
waiting to turn it to the Indians game.
Nice people, basically.
We don’t even bother to hate him.
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