The Poetry Foundation

If I were an early person

I'd look for the limits of human wisdom

by going to sacred oak trees

or the local blind man with lips on fire.

But this is now. This is NYC.

I go to Clive.

We meet in a diner

and queue for the breakfast special.

Clive's British.

He tries to make the large Hispanic short-order cook appreciate "underdone"

French toast. "My wife told me

not to say soggy," says Clive.

We pay. Currie shows up.

We sit and talk

of Clive's next trip to Guantanamo where,

although he's visited 56 times, they're questioning

(this time) his signature.

He laughs.

His current client, a Moroccan man,

has been cleared for release

and also informed

he will never leave.

Clive, a lawyer,questions the logic of this.

"I shouldn't laugh."

He tells more stories.

"Evidence" at Guantanamo comes often from snitches.

When the same snitch brought evidence

against 300 different people,

Clive wondered about motive

and did some research. The fact was,

each time the guy snitched

he got a free pass to "the love shack"

where the Americans show porn.

Clive plans to question

the number 300

on statistical grounds.

Most of us know only 300 people

in the whole world, demographers say.

If you think like a lawyer

you find the limits of human wisdom

in facts like that.

His French toast arrives.

"Is it underdone?" I ask. He sighs

and tells

of his son at home who's obsessed with The Goon Show.

I don't think like a lawyer.

I'm looking to see

how the sacred oaks come whispering through a man like Clive,

now striving for people on death row or places like Gitmo

for 35 years,

but worried

his son doesn't see the merits of Monty Python

or grasp its direct descent from the Goons.

I imagine a tumbling squabbling family

back home in the Midlands.

Clive looks at his watch.

I take scraps of French toast to the trash.

We'll meet again.

He likes the idea

(Currie's idea)

of travelling around Pakistan with a troop of square dancers.

Because the square dance is a "greeting dance

and we need more greeting! Clive smiles

and goes up the street

in his saggy-butt pants,

looking not much like a high-powered lawyer,

and the limits of human wisdom remain

(as we who confuse the greetings of dogs and gods

prefer limits

do) more

or less

where they were.

Source: Wrong Norma. (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2024)