When statues topple, they do little heaving.
You will not see them celebrate long their fall
or mount the wreckage on a wall.
(Who are you to ask that they applaud
your moment of awakening?
In the creak and give of floorboards,
hollow of trees felled by storms,
fists of despots, palms of departing lovers,
click of deadbolts, swing of doors;
To be trapped in an era, this era,
is the poet’s nightmare and delight. O future
readers—if there will be readers—what will you make
of this? What shall I—what shall we—bequeath you?
The true traitor lacks not morals but moral imagination. I shall
no longer grant the premise that we must debate amidst the
rubble of a world the unimaginative have plundered—
The last thing he saw was the joy in her eyes.
Back home the flowers have wilted and the balloon,
twisting slowly in the now-stale air,
sinks lower and lower to the ground.
I so want to be optimistic and airy, to write of
our generous spirit, to wax poetic about moon landings
and beach landings, entrepreneurship, sliced bread,
the assembly line, the World Wide Web. It feels un-American
I hire the police that protect my home from the hordes
that would tax me: I need nothing from the State, and so
give nothing to the State.
I hope it’s not too late to stop the carnage.
America forgives itself so easily, as
though we weren’t forgiving but forgetting.
Peel back my eyes
and touch the still-healing wound
oozing cerebral fluid from the Big Bang.
It’s in this blind space of raw pain
I often dwell.
“How does one with no boots
pull himself up by his bootstraps?”
“Why teach someone to fish
then deny them access to the lake?”