American Incognito

But to whatever animal we ascribe these remains, it is certain such a one has existed in America, and that it has been the largest of all terrestrial beings. It should have sufficed to have rescued the earth it inhabited, and the atmosphere it breathed, from the imputation of impotence. . . .

—Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

 

 

I called for armour, rose, and did not reel.

But when I thought . . .

                                      I could feel

My wound open wide.

—Thom Gunn, “The Wound”

 

 

 

THE STATES

 

For he can creep.

 

Whose doctor said his bipolar was pre-existing.

Smacked in the head by a steel cargo door,

hinges tied with a hamburger bag.

The day he blew up: a sucking silence, mouth of tar,

     story told over and over.

 

bump and rattle, caissons rolling.

The blacked-out school bus window is

scratched to read GHOST RECON. Street signs flash by,

“This here is Georgia. Now I see New Hampshire,

     and here’s Colorado.” What country is this city?

 

Gorked on pain-relief cocktails, Iraq to Landstuhl Med

to Andrews Air Force, wheelchair bus to Walter Reed.

Wounded when burning poppies, now afloat

on morphine. “As a state,” he once emailed,

     “Afghanistan is next to Mars.”

 

The navigator slides along a wall:

“Sir, can you show me north?”

Where the gazebo is a tank. Where the manhole covers a bomb.

Who apologize for shaving cuts. Skull plate,

     40-lb. gain from meds, big ox baby.

 

“Fall in,” the heart-attack sergeant tells

the legless man. “At ease,” he tells the psychotics.

They limp by drug dealers for their scoop

of Baskin-Robbins. Are told,

     “Suck it up, get used to the outside world.”

 

Who are saved, but die in dreams,

salute with a mechanical arm.

 

 

CONSTITUTION AVE, CAPITALSAURUS DAY

 

Beneath the marble, beneath the paper laws;

the paved boglands and legs-up taverns,

the slave-built steps of the Capitol. Winter 1898,

a sewer-man digs up a dinosaur spine,

      a nomen nudum, naked & unnamed fossil

 

tombed later at the Smithsonian

near Jefferson’s Mammoth tooth

that rattled his pocket, cherished knuckle-bone

and proof against the French naturalist

      who with powdered hands

 

wrote that New World dampness and cold

had stunted flora, animals, and Man:

the American Degeneracy. 

Jefferson ordered Lewis & Clark to find

      a living Mammoth,

 

the “animal de l’Ohio”

grazing somewhere west

of Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, and—

lest a species wither, or Nation grow small—

      brought Mammoth bones to Monticello.

 

“WHEREAS, the remains of a large carnivorous dinosaur,

which may be an ancestor of the Tyrannosaurus rex,

were found at First and ‘F’ Streets, SE,

 

NOW, THEREFORE, I, MAYOR OF THE DISTRICT

OF COLUMBIA, do hereby proclaim January 28, 2001,

as ‘CAPITALSAURUS DAY.’”

 

Anthony A. Williams

 

 

DISCOVERY IN SIBERIA

 

Reindeer of the herdsman Jarkov nuzzle

a tusk frozen 20,000 years. Soon,

French naturalists arrive. Radar shows

the Holy Grail of Mammoth hunters,

      a frigid bulk, twice an elephant’s size—

 

Timber saws cut the block. Hoisted by

military helicopter to Stalin’s

gulag caves, frozen labs for scientist-prisoners,

now re-opened. Waving hair-dryers

      to sublimate the ice, so that Discovery

 

can film them planting clone eggs

inside an elephant, hatching a Mammoth

American defender to split the ramparts,

show scheduled for release in 2001

      —the year, in the sci-fi film,

 

the monkeys learn to talk;

when Mayor Williams greets      

the Capitalsaurus and the new President Bush;

when Mohammed Atta decides he

      cannot date a waitress.

 

 

SECURITAS

 

Weary headlands roll through zones of night,

red lights flash the muted streets,

crotch-of-moss draining a blue spark dawn—

We sleep, staring. Tree-shapes and stars prod us,

      the belt of Orion is a martyr’s bomb.

 

And the king, our godsbody, lies abed

groaning, chill spirit belaboring the flesh—

His spit and sperm are tallied; his temperature,

a weather report told by doctors. Until

      lady Securitas peers from a cloud—

 

her bloodlined hands, the blank, bureaucratic face!

We pray with our bodies: cold sweat, a hymn

of twitches, heart racing, shrieking dreams . . .

But fragrant Securitas has only

       come for him—

 

To compass him about.

Lifting out her breast.

Stoppers his mouth with a thick nipple.

Squeezing till the ichor throbs from his eyes,

      milk to make us thirsty—

 

 

IRAQ & TEXAS: DJINN ROADS

 

Helicopters park at Forward Base EXXON;

only the sand is flying today, and it breaks

the speed limits, 50 miles an hour. Visibility zero;

the air is hot as blood, the sky is burnt amber.

      Lord keep still our hands.

 

In Texas, teens patrol the roads by night,

burning the body’s fuel—State Troopers pull them over.

George, fishtailing dauphin, a graceful

falldown drunk, clouds the breathalyzer:

      FELONY DUI. Daddy’s name sinks the report—

 

Election night, heaven staring, and Laura’s

yellowcake Chevy mows down her boyfriend:

VEHICULAR HOMICIDE: the car found guilty.

“I know this as an adult, it was crushing,”

      she recalls. Her scented, unmarked body

 

sweats beneath foundation garments and paste.

His unmarked body, and fructifying breath,

his stone squint chasing snakes from the sun—

They walk, O my darling, the hill of light;

      the bite of remorse teaches them to bite.

 

Then it rains. What falls from the sky is not water

but mud, raindrops pulling clouds of sand

into large wet globs. “It was biblical,” says

Col. Gibbs. Lights a cigarette, his back to the storm:

      “You’ve got to embrace the suck.”

 

 

HOTEL AFTERMATH

 

From the dust, the limbs jerk up alive, stagger home

to camp. Martian: neck gators for the nose, goggles

seal off the eyes, baby wipes. WHAT DID YOU FIND THERE?

A slipper, an ear, some wire. A chemical suit.

      A map of water.

           ——

 

From Stalin’s cave, just bits of gristle—unreadable,

no Frankenstein DNA. They rewrite the Mammoth show.

 

From Walter Reed, “an aggressive campaign

to deal with the mice infestation.”

      Recovery rooms, “spit-polish clean.”

 

Whose mother swallows all the soldier medicine.

 

Who wheels himself in to play Texas Hold ‘Em.

 

Whose father says, “It was OK for my son

to give his body. They try in their power,

      but it reverses itself.”

 

Jefferson’s American Incognito

is ground up for fertilizer—

the maid said it was cow bones. Sweet heartland,

Governor Meriwether Lewis

      of Louisiana, depression pre-existing,

 

shoots himself in the chest and head.

 

Who sit by the apples and wingback chairs.

“If I had two hands, I’d order two vodkas”—

 

Who cannot count his change.

      Who wake up and punch the air.