Census

By Carol Muske-Dukes b. 1945 Carol Muske-Dukes

Here's how we were counted:

firstborn, nay-sayers,

veterans, slow-payers,

seditionists, convicts,

half-breeds, has-beens,

the nearly defined dead,

all the disenfranchised live.

Once everybody had a place

among the nameless. Now we

can't afford to be anonymous.

Consider, they said, the poor,

the misfit—consider the woman

figuring herself per cent.

Consider the P.A. system making

a point so intimate I petition

not to be anybody's good guess

or estimate. I ask to be one:

maybe widow-to-be watching the sun

diminish brick by brick along the jail

wall and also that green pear

on its drunken roll out

of the executioner's lunch basket.

At 12:01, 02, in the cocked chamber

of the digital clock

the newsman said: There'll be less

work in the new century. And my job

will be, as usual, forgetting—

or getting it backwards—

each non-integer, tender and separate,

fake rosebud, Rolodex, cab full of amputees

obedient to traffic, moss on the baby's headstone . . .

minus and minus' shock each minute,

the kiss, its loss,

each newborn and condemned-to-be

in one breath executed, and blessed.

Carol Muske-Dukes, “Census” from Skylight (New York: Doubleday, 1981). Copyright © 1981 by Carol Muske-Dukes. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Source: An Octave Above Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Doubleday, 1997)

Biography

Carol Muske-Dukes was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1945. She earned a BA from Creighton University and an MA at San Francisco State University. Her collections of poetry include Camouflage (1975), Applause (1989), An Octave Above Thunder: New and Selected Poems (1997), Sparrow (2003), which was a National Book Award finalist, and Twin Cities (2011). In addition to poetry, Muske-Dukes has published two collections of essays, . . .

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