Reading a Biography of Thomas Jefferson
in the Months of My Son’s Recovery

 

Because he bought the great swath of mucky swamp

And marshy wetland on the southern edge of the newborn nation,

Then let it alone, so it could fulminate, over time

Into its queer and patchwork, private self—

 

Because he forged a plowshare from paranoia

About the motivations of Napoleon, declining to incite

A war, and approved, instead, a purchase order—

Because he would have settled for New Orleans, but acquired

The whole thing anyway, through perseverance and hard

Bargaining, and not being too close with the government’s money—

 

Because he bought it all.

                                     A half million acres.

                                                                          Sight unseen—

 

Because he loved great silences, and alligators, and bustling ports,

And unfettered access to commerce, and international

Trade, and bowery, stone-paved courtyards, noisy

With clattering palms, and formal drawing rooms

Cooled with high ceilings and shuttered windows, furnished

In the lush, upholstered styles of Louis Quinze. Because he valued

Imported wines and dark, brewed coffees, and had a tongue

That understood those subtle differences, but still succumbed,

Thrilled as a child by the strange, uncataloged creatures that crawled

And swam and winged themselves through the unknown Territory—

 

Because of all this, I return thanks to Thomas Jefferson

For his flawed example of human greatness, for the mind-boggling

Diversity of Louisiana—birthplace of my second son,

13th of December 1990, the largest child delivered

                          to the state that day . . .

*

 

Can’t help drawing back at how he lived in two minds

Because he was of two minds like a person

With old-time manic depression: the slaveholder

And the Democrat, the tranquil hilltop of Monticello,

And the ringing cobblestones of Paris, France. The white

Wife, and the concubine: enslaved and black . . .

 

*

 

Before he was my son, he was contained

Within a clutch of dangling eggs that waited,

All atremble, for his father’s transforming glob

Of universal glue.

 

From the beginning—before

The beginning—before he had arranged

Himself into a fetal entity, and begun

Growing inside me, he was endangered

By the mind-breaking molecules our ancestors

Hoarded, and passed forward in a blameless

Game of chance, shuffling the genes.

 

Even then, two minds circulated inside him,

Tantalizing a brand-new victim with generations

Of charged-up narratives of drugs and drink,

Of suicide and mania, of melancholic unmodulated

Moods, bedeviling distant aunts who died early,

And wild cousins who loved their night drives

On dark roads with doused headlights, speedometer

Straining to the arc of its limit, mothers who danced

On the dining room table, kicking aside the Thanksgiving

Turkey, carefully basted hours before.

 

We marveled at him in his bassinet—such

An unsoothable infant, so unreconciled to breathing

Oxygen, wearing a diaper, waiting for milk.

Still small and manageable at first. But whirling

Moods, baby-sized, and effervescent

As the liminal clouds of early spring, stalked him

Even then. Even then

                                      This Thing stalked him

Threatening his freedom

                                        And his right to self-rule.

*

 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men

are created equal, that they are endowed by their

Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among

these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

               —FROM THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE (1776)

 

                                        Before we were

Ourselves he knew us. Explained us

To ourselves. Gave us a language whereby

We understood the restless grandiosities of our forebears,

And set us off on our well-trod path of personal

Liberty and greedy freedom-seeking. Minted the metaphors

We go on living by and misinterpreting, and clobbering

Over the heads of the rest of the world—Still,

His language stirs me up. Still, I believe

He was a great man, and seek in the painful

Contradictions of his personal life and public

Service, ongoing signs for how to live

In this strange era.

 

*

 

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers

of society but the people themselves. And if we

think them not enlightened enough to exercise

their control with a wholesome discretion,

the remedy is not to take it from them,

but to inform their discretion by education . . .

               —FROM A LETTER TO W. C. JARVIS (1820)

 

Once more, we drive our son to the treatment center,

And sign him in, and watch him stripped of identity

And privacy. Shoelaces and cigarettes. Cell phone.

A dog-eared novel by Cormac McCarthy. A plastic bag

Stuffed with things we take away with us, and weep over,

Driving home. He has lost the safe depository of himself.

Is dispossessed. Is lacking any wholesome discretion

On his own behalf. Indicted by genetics, disempowered

By blood, how should we school him, except by love

And psychotropic medications?

 

*

 

Flight of ideas and verbal grandiosity:

Imaginary master of vast terrains, teeming

With fanciful creatures and fearsome weather:

A Louisiana Territory of a child’s mind

Born there, after all, its doors and windows

Propped open to admit the gorgeous scenes

Of extreme weather, thriving in the rapid cycles

Of tropical heat, the coloratura of radical sunsets,

The tympanic symphonies of downpours

That dampened every day, and then were

Scorched dry by the blistering sun. Early

Symptoms we overlooked, and nurtured instead

As precocious tendencies of a burgeoning poet

Or a future president . . .

 

 

*

 

The man must be a prodigy who can retain

his manners and morals undepraved by such

circumstances [as those of slavery].

               —FROM Notes on the State of Virginia (1787)

 

In the long nights when I can’t sleep,

When anxiety courses through my body,

Racheting up to a stiff rod of fear and dread

I feel impaled upon, I sometimes let my mind

Drift to Thomas Jefferson and his famous

Inconsistencies . . . Here he is, tranquilly

Trotting through the bracing sunlight

Of national history, all long bones and red hair,

The eloquent incitements of his discourse scrolling

Out the documents that determined our fate.

But there he is at night, other mind in ascendance,

Tying shut the bed-curtains of a lover he inventoried

Among his personal property. With whom he made

Six children. Though legally he “owned” her.

And then “owned” them. His very own—

His sons and daughters . . .

 

The way that two things can coexist without

Canceling each other out—how did he live

Like that? How does my own son live like that?

As a schoolchild longs for certainty, I crave

An answer, and sometimes hold my two hands up

To weigh the yes against the no, slavery

In one hand, freedom in the other: a tiny exercise

In bipolarity that never helps.

 

*

 

Sometimes it helps to latch on

To someone else’s vision

In a crisis—the way I did

At Monticello, so long ago,

Stumbling along the rain-slicked

Bricks of orderly paths. Working-class girl

In cheap shoes and plastic glasses,

Bad teeth. Terrified by the new world

Of the mind I’d entered. From the strict

Arrangements and smoothed-out edges

Of all those interwoven pavers someone baked

From clay, carted there, laid out by hand,

Brick by brick by brick, I carved a small sanity

Where I could rest. And read.

 

 

*

 

I cannot live without books, he wrote.

And so gave permission for a kind of life

Previously unimaginable: this life I live now—

Soothing myself and seeking comprehension

Among my many volumes.