[Newspoetry] new poem, this time

[Geoffrey Kurtz]

Test of Power: Inspectors Tour an Iraqi Palace
(http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/04/international/middleeast/04BAGH.html)

Iraq has seen many remarkable
scenes in the first week of the new zero-
tolerance weapons inspections.
But there has been nothing
to compare with the moment today
when two teams of United Nations inspectors

became six point two three four billion inspectors,
scattered and startled by the remarkable
fact of their multiplication. Before today,
observations approached zero.
The popular thing to look at was nothing.
Trillions of events passed without inspections.

Now we make time for no task but inspections.
Now we set out to be no one but inspectors.
Objects, absences, patterns, relations: nothing--
or, not anything really remarkable--
escapes us. From zero
to everything, just today.

We'll be exhausted by the end of today.
We'll say, "Who'd've thought new inspections
could find new metaphors and monkeywrenches? I had zero
ideas and no inclinations. Now studious inspectors
roam everywhere. How remarkable
how, before, we'd noticed nothing."

But of course nothing
I've said is true, tomorrow or today.
No one finds it remarkable
when old books, new leaves, even implications get no inspections
from the six point two three four un-inspectors
with their no notebooks and pencils blunt like zero.

A Greek named Zero
(or something like that) said that nothing
inspectors
inspect today
will be available for inspections
tomorrow. He did not think this remarkable.

What's remarkable to me is the zero
dollars my inspections earn me. Nothing
doing. I wish inspectors got good pay, at least today.