Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 7

Smoke rises as a US Apache helicopter hovers over Baghdad's restive Haifa street district. A steady barrage of machine-gun fire and mortars was thundering across Baghdad as Iraqi and US forces battled insurgents in one of the capital's Sunni bastions.
(AFP/Sabah Arar)

Crowds Surround Us

by Tom Thompson

agile founderings and piecemeal flotations.

The crowd constitutes a gravitational field

that slaps back at the ground, numbed

and maddened by ground’s constant suckling.

The crowd embodies a depression in fabric

more than an attraction. Its angled, arteried, fleet

fantasias of need sway in

a loopy, bobbing dance without strings.

It’s this sense of movement the organism uses

to believe in its own existence, the palpable presence

of an intangible parade, uncertain

planetary marches, a supernumerary of stars.

In its mania for artifice the crowd has sewn the sky

with these shiny extras. Embodied

adoration, they snap the organism shut

before tickling it open again

with reedy gestures. Breathe.

The crowd’s louche body

clings and parts in place, an ovation

rigid and adrift, alive. It is the sea

that sweeps the sea.

Broom tight with inner bickering.

A mortal scour. Meaning,

how the crowd hates the crowd.

Outwardly. It admits you or me

as an enormous lidless eye admits glittering

beams. Endless watching, washing us in.

The crowd’s object, its point,

is always vanishing into its own mass. It is a sea

with no concern for us, even as it scores.