Whenever concerns are raised about the widening disparities of income and wealth in this country, there are warnings from the right about igniting class warfare. I suppose that there's a little truth in that, but the likelihood of marching hedge fund managers to the guillotine or forcing plutocrats into exile in Shanghai is pretty small.

In actuality, at this time the most virulent class hatreds are between strata of the working/middle class. And these are not fomented by liberals. Until a few decades ago, those ill-paid and ill-treated by employers could hope to emulate their better-off fellows in union jobs by organizing and bargaining collectively for better pay and better treatment. But now that the tide of unionization has gone out, there is little of this hope. What remains is a lot of bitter envy.

Abuses of power by unions--burdensome work rules, pensions that bankrupt companies, protection of incompetent workers--are constantly pointed to. Examples are not hard to find. When I was was growing up, the folks in my extended family were probably the only Republican factory workers in Toledo. And there were stories about Uncle Freddy going to work with a knife in his waistband to protect himself against against union thugs. But any individual or institution with power is quite likely to eventually abuse it. Examples are not hard to find. A employer of much size at all will have greater power than its individual employees. We cannot strip them of the countervailing power that organizing gives them.

What public employees in Ohio should sacrifice to help alleviate the state's fiscal distress can certainly be negotiated. But those who recently gained political power would seek to strip public employees of collective bargaining rights even in the best of times. Do not let them use the present crisis to persuade us to let them do it.

In Passing

I have myself
held a newborn son,
living,
but too young to live.

These grief trains
have no doors to open,
no common measure of their loads.
Just a wave, then,
through a clouded window,
from one passing
on a distant track.

Blueberry Smoothie

Shocking shard of glass
on my tongue that becomes ice
as it disappears.

Who is an American?

Regardless of their parentage, people who have lived here all their lives and are linguistically and culturally American are American. Law should acknowledge this fact. I would vote for the Dream Act, although the reality of these folks being our countrymen ought not to be conditioned upon their going to college or serving in the military. If they're PhD's, they're American PhD's and if they're criminals, they're American criminals. But if the bill passes it will likely be because it appeals to our sense of magnanimity. And that good feeling of granting citizenship to people who not quite fully entitled to it is bound up in those conditions.

On the other hand, a one-year-old who is deported along with its parents should be no more entitled to citizenship because it was born a week after its family came here than if had been born a week before. I'm inclined to think that changing the 14th Amendment to reflect this logic would cause more rancor than it's worth. But if we were starting from scratch, my view is that mere birth on American soil ought not to be sufficient qualification for citizenship.

Remains

And one will remain
the unseen sleeper
for the other,
still dressing in the winter dark.

Long after Li Shangyin

I write, my friend,
from far Bashan,
ringed with peaks,
the heart of the continent
if I came from here,
watching chill rain
gather leaves in swirling pools,
far from you, and home,
and the city by the eastern sea,
and imagine myself
on the hill above your house,
watching the two of us,
whenever we might meet again,
framed in your western window:
you light the lamp
and I begin to tell you
of cold rain on far Bashan
and of myself, here, ringed by mountains
and watching that rain,
more content now,
beheld in that uncertain future.

THREE TOLEDO POEMS WRITTEN IN VIRGINIA

I. In Summer, the Richmond Water is as Warm as a Last Swallow of Coffee

Where I come from
in NW Ohio
the guys would play baseball all day long,
and between innings and arguments
about missed flies and fouls and chicken claws
we'd all, Fat George and Stanley and Little Stanley,
run to the concrete fountain in center field
and drink
and splash on our sweaty heads
the water that on the hottest day
still came up cold
from the deep mains,
and recollected in us
the creak of trodden snow on a cold and cloudy day.
And so was our everyboy's summer
refreshed by the winter that underlay all.


II.

In Willys Park,
hard up against the Jeep plant,
when the tennis players,
tired of being pelted by balls,
stopped our Home Run Derby
and the guys with uniforms
chased us from the diamonds
and the water was too high
to look for rubbers on the island
in the creek at the foot of the sledding hill
and it was adult time at the pool,
we'd leave the bright field and,
going down into the damp woods,
sidle along the crossbar
of the wrought-iron fence above the dam
and emerge again
into the sunshine
of the cemetery
where the peacocks strutted and squalled
among the decades of dead Chinese.


III. In their Winding, the Roads Here in Hanover County May Go Anywhere

The mystery in the country there
is not on the roads
that each mile lie in parallel lines
and go on till they get somewhere,
nor in the fields all full
of black dirt and whitened stubble
or then of green corn or beets or beans,
but in the woodlots
back from the highway
that, unless you knew the farmer--
as I never did--
remained those middle-distance woods
always at the center
as you circled the square
you made
turning toward them at very crossroad.
And it was trees,
maybe elm or oak or sycamore,
if a wood was carried
by a creek out to the crown road.