Stanzas Beginning with Some Lines of Rumsfeld

People study things all the time that don't lead to things

and it is not pursuing
us down the back-
alley procedure—an
elevated
state of why

and it is not developing
horns, tumors, or other
old-growth failings
in the results drawn
from a scoured trailer

it is not building
white cities in the
civilized silt, ran-
sacked and hard
against blistered skin

it is not manufacturing
the closed-up case
of sugar water, its
fizzy lust
for the tongue

and it’s not deploying
freedom across a
flooding plain, one
stop-dike finger,
one scrabbling hand

and it is not using
what it knows of us
for pleasure—only
caring what
can be made of it