Classic Poem

Granted, it's worked. As a nation
it's worked—if imperfectly; if
so deaf to its own great bell
the old bloody Caribbean
could foam up as far north
as Antietam and Gettysburgh
before it ebbed finally, its wrack
ubiquitous yet, a corrosive dust
in every crack of the republic;
and if a once-welcoming
feathered and painted folk
be discounted—a few phantoms
on their parchment ponies
and itineraries of tears.

It worked, you could say,
as this world goes—
by normal zoology: out-
breed, out-bite, or out-run.

Worked, you could well add,
by corporate standards: Us
(U.S.) the junk-bond-
leveraged Tyrannosaur
of the Post Holocene . . . .

However
something intangible,
a condition like vapor lock,
long remained hidden in it:
It had no history —or
so it supposed. Histories
were the hobbles of those Old
Nations born in the slow
contractions of the millenia,
while ours was Caesarian,
abrupt, a something torn
clear of history, its rump
to all that, its face
like the sun's westward westward
westward, never looking back.

Nothing to look back to .
No nobles, pontiffs, kings,
prophets or gods; only
those thirty-odd businessmen,
lawyers, planters—Great Men,
some of them, but still men—
Rube Goldberging a device
for processing Future Time
to maximum advantage. Not
“what happened?” but “what's next?”
No way they would not build-in
vapor locks at the start
without knowing—or, knowing,
hopeful they'd rattle out
with a little mileage. For one,
Slavery, a vapor then
no bigger than a man's hand
(say Randolph's or Washington's)
and nothing to block comity
in England-bred gentlemen
of property and goodwill;

for another, the vaporous
semantics of “We the People”,
noted only by Hamilton
in a moment of candor (“Your
people, sir, is a great beast.”)
What would he say now? Something
of “ sensitive dependence
on initial conditions ”? No.
We'd get the old brief—with
less brevity: Your people, sir,
two hundred million snouts
and four hundred million buttocks,
have eaten the continent
and paved what's left the better
for drive-by shootings and the like
sedentary recreations. . . .
Too
true, Mr. Treasurer … But
it wasn't your Great Beast
who, with a quill wand,
conjured a continent
into bankers' collateral
and began the long meta-
morphosis of a vast country
into a vast city. More
than one sort of snout rooted
in the general patrimony.

What had been slow work for teeth
was a breeze for the Gatling guns
and steam-shovels and dynamite
that goose-quill underwrote.
Yet neither can blame the other.
Nor should. Who'd have believed,
back then, a manifestly in-
finite regress of empty
horizons, a very forehead
of the world, could wither
under us like a torched leaf?
What we thought, if we thought, then
was that good laws make good men.
Oh, it's worked, you could say,
despite vacuums and vapors,
despite the categorical non-
existence of history.

But history, in consequence,
couldn't be seen coming
when it caught up and passed . . . .
Pace Utopia. Blood
is thicker than ink . . . .
And yet

ink lasts longer. Those old
quixotic axioms—a more perfect union /
domestic tranquility /
the general welfare /
blessings of liberty—two
centuries have trampled on
and not effaced yet—history
has got hold of them now
and us with them, greybeards
or dreadlocks, all one.

Otherwise, compatriot,
there's your history and my history
but no our history. Otherwise
it's the Zoological Year
N Billion; a certain species
has fished-out the Seven Seas
and chainsawed to timberline
and invented the Hell Bomb
and a global semantosphere
of cacophony and commercial trash
and a zodiac blinkering out
in orbiting BEER signs
and there never was nor will be
any Grand Experiment
in self-rule; only Jefferson's
question left, echoing
in some dim Virginia
of lost legend: IF MEN
ARE UNFIT TO GOVERN THEMSELVES,
WHOM SHOULD THEY GOVERN?