FROM AN EXPLANATION OF AMERICA

(A Poem to My Daughter)

PART TWO, I. A Love of Death

Imagine a child from Virginia or New Hampshire

Alone on the prairie eighty years ago

Or more, one afternoon—the shaggy pelt

Of grasses, for the first time in that child’s life,

Flowing for miles. Imagine the moving shadow

Of a cloud far off across that shadeless ocean,

The obliterating strangeness like a tide

That pulls or empties the bubble of the child’s

Imaginary heart. No hills, no trees.

The child’s heart lightens, tending like a bubble

Towards the currents of the grass and sky,

The pure potential of the clear blank spaces.

Or, imagine the child in a draw that holds a garden

Cupped from the limitless motion of the prairie,

Head resting against a pumpkin, in evening sun.

Ground-cherry bushes grow along the furrows,

The fruit red under its papery, moth-shaped sheath.

Grasshoppers tumble among the vines, as large

As dragons in the crumbs of pale dry earth.

The ground is warm to the child’s cheek, and the wind

Is a humming sound in the grass above the draw,

Rippling the shadows of the red-green blades.

The bubble of the child’s heart melts a little,

Because the quiet of that air and earth

Is like the shadow of a peaceful death—

Limitless and potential; a kind of space

Where one dissolves to become a part of something

Entire … whether of sun and air, or goodness

And knowledge, it does not matter to the child.

Dissolved among the particles of the garden

Or into the motion of the grass and air,

Imagine the child happy to be a thing.

Imagine, then, that on that same wide prairie

Some people are threshing in the terrible heat

With horses and machines, cutting bands

And shoveling amid the clatter of the threshers,

The chaff in prickly clouds and the naked sun

Burning as if it could set the chaff on fire.

Imagine that the people are Swedes or Germans,

Some of them resting pressed against the strawstacks,

Trying to get the meager shade.

                                                         A man,

A tramp, comes laboring across the stubble

Like a mirage against that blank horizon,

Laboring in his torn shoes toward the tall

Mirage-like images of the tilted threshers

Clattering in the heat. Because the Swedes

Or Germans have no beer, or else because

They cannot speak his language properly,

Or for some reason one cannot imagine,

The man climbs up on a thresher and cuts bands

A minute or two, then waves to one of the people,

A young girl or a child, and jumps head-first

Into the sucking mouth of the machine,

Where he is wedged and beat and cut to pieces—

While the people shout and run in the clouds of chaff,

Like lost mirages on the pelt of prairie.

 

PART TWO, III. Horace, Epistulae I, xvi

The poet Horace, writing to a friend

About his Sabine farm and other matters,

Implies his answer about aspiration

Within the prison of empire or republic:

“Dear Quinctius:

                               I’ll tell you a little about

My farm—in case you ever happen to wonder

About the place: as, what I make in grain,

Or if I’m getting rich on olives, apples,

Timber or pasture.

                                  There are hills, unbroken

Except for one soft valley, cut at an angle

That sweetens the climate, because it takes the sun

All morning on its right slope, until the left

Has its turn, warming as the sun drives past

All afternoon. You’d like it here: the plums

And low-bush berries are ripe; and where my cows

Fill up on acorns and ilex-berries a lush

Canopy of shade gives pleasure to their master.

The green is deep, so deep you’d say Tarentum

Had somehow nestled closer, to be near Rome.

There is a spring, fit for a famous river

(The Hebrus winds through Thrace no colder or purer),

Useful for healing stomach-aches and head-aches.

And here I keep myself, and the place keeps me—

A precious good, believe it, Quinctius—

In health and sweetness through September’s heat.

You of course live in the way that is truly right,

If you’ve been careful to remain the man

That we all see in you. We here in Rome

Talk of you, always, as ‘happy’… there is the fear,

Of course, that one might listen too much to others,

Think what they see, and strive to be that thing,

And lose by slow degrees that inward man

Others first noticed—as though, if over and over

Everyone tells you you’re in marvelous health,

You might towards dinner-time, when a latent fever

Falls on you, try for a long while to disguise it,

Until the trembling rattles your food-smeared hands.

It’s foolishness to camouflage our sores.

Take ‘recognition’—what if someone writes

A speech about your service to your country,

Telling for your attentive ears the roll

Of all your victories by land or sea,

With choice quotations, dignified periods,

And skillful terms, all in the second person,

As in the citations for honorary degrees;

‘Only a mind beyond our human powers

Could judge if your great love for Rome exceeds,

Or is exceeded by, Rome’s need for you.’

—You’d find it thrilling, but inappropriate

For anyone alive, except Augustus.

And yet if someone calls me ‘wise’ or ‘flawless’

Must one protest? I like to be told I’m right,

And brilliant, as much as any other man.

The trouble is, the people who give out

The recognition, compliments, degrees

Can take them back tomorrow, if they choose:

Sorry, but isn’t that ours, that you nearly took?

What can I do, but shuffle sadly off?

If the same people scream that I’m a crook

Who’d strangle my father for money to buy a drink,

Should I turn white with pain and humiliation?

If prizes and insults from outside have much power

To hurt or give joy, something is sick inside.

Who is the good man?

                                         Many people would answer,

‘He is the man who never breaks the law

Or violates our codes. His judgment is sound.

He is the man whose word is as his bond.

If such a man agrees to be your witness,

Your case is won.’

                                And yet this very man,

If you ask his family, or the people who know him,

Is like a rotten egg in its flawless shell.

And if a slave or prisoner should say

‘I never steal, I never try to escape,’

My answer is, ‘You have your just rewards:

No beatings; no solitary; and your food.’

‘I have not killed.’ ‘You won’t be crucified.’

‘But haven’t I shown that I am good, and honest?’

To this, my country neighbor would shake his head

And sigh: ‘Ah no! The wolf himself is wary

Because he fears the pit, as hawks the snare

Or pike the hook. Some folk hate vice for love

Of the good: you’re merely afraid of guards and crosses.’

Apply that peasant wisdom to that ‘good man’

Of forum and tribunal, who in the temple

Calls loudly on ‘Father Janus’ or ‘Apollo’

But in an undertone implores, ‘Laverna,

Goddess of thieves, O Fair One, grant me, please,

That I get away with it, let me pass as upright,

Cover my sins with darkness, my lies with clouds.’

When a man stoops to pluck at the coin some boys

Of Rome have soldered to the street, I think

That just then he is no more free than any

Prisoner or slave; it seems that someone who wants

Too much to get things is also someone who fears,

And living in that fear cannot be free.

A man has thrown away his weapons, has quit

The struggle for virtue, who is always busy

Filling his wants, getting things, making hay—

Weaponless and defenseless as a captive.

When you have got a captive, you never kill him

If you can sell him for a slave; this man

Truly will make a good slave: persevering,

Ambitious, eager to please—as plowman, or shepherd,

Or trader plying your goods at sea all winter,

Or helping to carry fodder on the farm …

The truly good, and wise man has more courage,

And if need be, will find the freedom to say,

As in the Bacchae of Euripides:

King Pentheus, King of Thebes, what will you force me

To suffer at your hands?

                                          I will take your goods.

You mean my cattle, furniture, cloth and plate?

Then you may have them.

                                             I will put you, chained,

Into my prison, under a cruel guard.

Then God himself, the moment that I choose,

Will set me free …

I think that what this means is, ‘I will die.’

Death is the chalk-line toward which all things race.”

 

PART TWO, IV. Filling the Blank

Odd, that the poet who seems so complacent

About his acorns and his cold pure water,

Writing from his retreat just out of Rome,

Should seem to end with a different love of death

From that of someone on a mystic plain—

But still, with love of death. “… A rather short man,”

He calls himself, “and prematurely gray,

Who liked to sit in the sun; a freedman’s child

Who spread his wings too wide for that frail nest

And yet found favor, in both war and peace,

With powerful men. Tell them I lost my temper

Easily, but was easily appeased,

My book—and if they chance to ask my age

Say, I completed my forty-fourth December

In the first year that Lepidus was Consul.”

I think that what the poet meant was this:

That freedom, even in a free Republic,

Rests ultimately on the right to die.

And though he’s careful to say that Quinctius,

The public man able to act for good

And help his fellow-Romans, lives the life

That truly is the best, he’s also careful

To separate their fortunes and their places,

And to appreciate his own: his health,

His cows and acorns and his healing spring,

His circle—“We here in Rome”—for friends and gossip.

It would be too complacent to build a nest

Between one’s fatalism and one’s pleasures—

With death at one side, a sweet farm at the other,

Keeping the thorns of government away …

Horace’s father, who had been a slave,

Engaged in some small business near Venusia;

And like a Jewish or Armenian merchant

Who does well in America, he sent

His son to Rome’s best schools, and then to Athens

(It’s hard to keep from thinking “as to Harvard”)

To study, with the sons of gentlemen

And politicians, the higher arts most useful

To citizens of a Republic: math;

Philosophy; rhetoric in all its branches.

One March, when Horace, not quite twenty-one,

Was still at Athens, Julius Caesar died,

And the Roman world was split by civil war.

When Brutus came to Athens late that summer

On his way to Asia Minor—“half-mystical,

Wholly romantic Brutus”—Horace quit school

To follow Brutus to Asia, bearing the title

Or brevet-commission tribunus militum,

And served on the staff of the patriot-assassin.

Time passed; the father died; the property

And business were lost, or confiscated.

The son saw action at Philippi, where,

Along with other enthusiastic students

(Cicero’s son among them), and tens of thousands

In the two largest armies of Roman soldiers

Ever to fight with one another, he shared

In the republican army’s final rout

By Antony and Octavian.

                                             Plutarch says

That Brutus, just before he killed himself,

Speaking in Greek to an old fellow-student,

Said that although he was angry for his country

He was deeply happy for himself—because

His virtue and his repute for virtue were founded

In a way none of the conquerors could hope,

For all their arms and riches, to emulate;

Nor could they hinder posterity from knowing,

And saying, that they were unjust and wicked men

Who had destroyed justice and the Republic,

Usurping a power to which they had no right.

The corpse of Brutus was found by Antony,

And he commanded the richest purple mantle

In his possession to be thrown over it,

And afterward, the mantle being stolen,

He found the thief and had him put to death;

The ashes of Brutus he sent back to Rome,

To be received with honor by the mourners.

Horace came back to Rome a pardoned rebel

In his late twenties, without cash or prospects,

Having stretched out his wings too far beyond

The frail nest of his freedman father’s hopes,

As he has written.

                                 When he was thirty-five,

He published some poems which some people praised,

And so through Virgil he met the Roman knight

And good friend of Augustus, called Maecenas,

Who befriended him, and gave him the Sabine farm;

And in that place, and in the highest circles

In Rome itself, he spent his time, and wrote.

Since aspirations need not (some say, should not)

Be likely, should I wish for you to be

A hero, like Brutus—who at the finish-line

Declared himself to be a happy man?

Or is the right wish health, the just proportion

Of sun, the acorns and cold pure water, a nest

Out in the country and a place in Rome …

Of course, one’s aspirations must depend

Upon the opportunities: the justice

That happens to be available; one’s fortune.

I think that what the poet meant may be

Something like that; and as for aspiration,

Maybe our aspirations for ourselves

Ought to be different from the hopes we have

(Though there are warnings against too much hope)

When thinking of our children. And in fact

Our fantasies about the perfect life

Are different for ourselves and for our children,

Theirs being safer, less exciting, purer—

And so, depending always on the chances

Our country offers, it seems we should aspire,

For ourselves, to struggle actively to save

The Republic—or to be, if not like Brutus,

Like Quinctius: a citizen of affairs,

Free in the state and in the love of death …

While for our children we are bound to aspire

Differently: something like a nest or farm;

So that the cycle of different aspirations

Threads through posterity.

                                               And who can say

What Brutus may come sweeping through your twenties—

Given the taste you have for noble speeches,

For causes lost and glamorous and just.

Did Horace’s father, with his middle-class

And slavish aspirations, have it right?—

To give your child the education fit

For the upper classes: math, philosophy,

And rhetoric in all its branches; so I

Must want for you, when you must fall upon

The sword of government or mortality—

Since all of us, even you, race toward it—to have

The power to make your parting speech in Greek

(Or in the best equivalent) and if

You ever write for fame or money, that Virgil

Will pick your book out from a hundred others,

If that’s not plucking at a soldered coin.

 

PART THREE, I. Braveries

Once, while a famous town lay torn and burning

A woman came to childbed, and lay in labor

While all around her people cursed and screamed

In desperation, and soldiers raged insanely—

So that the child came out, the story says,

In the loud center of every horror of war.

And looking on that scene, just halfway out,

The child retreated backward, to the womb:

And chose to make those quiet walls its urn.

“Brave infant of Saguntum,” a poet says—

As though to embrace a limit might show courage.

(Although the word is more like bravo, the glory

Of a great tenor, the swagger of new clothes:

The infant as a brilliant moral performer

Defying in its retreat the bounds of life.)

Denial of limit has been the pride, or failing,

Famously shared by all our country’s regions,

Races, and classes, as though prepared to challenge

The idea of sufficiency itself …

And while it seems that in the name of limit

Some people are choosing to have fewer children,

Or none, that too can be a gesture of freedom—

A way to deny or brave the bounds of time.

A boundary is a limit. How can I

Describe for you the boundaries of this place

Where we were born: where Possibility spreads

And multiplies and exhausts itself in growing,

And opens yawning to swallow itself again,

Unrealized horizons forever dissolving?

A field house built of corrugated metal,

The frosted windows tilted open inward

In two lines high along the metal walls;

Inside, a horse-ring and a horse called Yankee

Jogging around the ring with clouds of dust

Rising and settling in the still, cold air

Behind the horse and rider as they course

Rhythmically through the bars of washed-out light

That fall in dim arcades all down the building.

The rider, a girl of seven or eight called Rose,

Concentrates firmly on her art, her body,

Her small, straight back and shoulders as they rise

Together with the alternate, gray shoulders

Of the unweary horse. Her father stands

And watches, in a business suit and coat,

Watching the child’s face under the black serge helmet,

Her yellow hair that bounces at her nape

And part-way down her back. He feels the cold

Of the dry, sunless earth up through the soles

Of his thin, inappropriate dress shoes.

He feels the limit of that simple cold,

And braves it, concentrating on the progress

Of the child riding in circles around the ring.

She is so charming that he feels less mortal.

As from the bravery of a fancy suit,

He takes crude courage from the ancient meaning

Of the horse, as from a big car or a business:

He feels as if the world had fewer limits.

The primitive symbols of the horse and girl

Seem goods profound and infinite, as clear

As why the stuffs of merchants are called, “goods.”

The goods of all the world seem possible

And clear in that brave spectacle, the rise

Up from the earth and onto the property

Of horses and the history of riding.

In his vague yearning, as he muses on goods

Lost and confused as chivalry, he might

Dream anything: as from the Cavalier

One might dream up the Rodeo, or the Ford,

Or some new thing the country waited for—

Some property, some consuming peasant dream

Of horses and walls; as though the Rodeo

And Ford were elegiac gestures; as though

Invented things gave birth to long-lost goods.

The country, boasting that it cannot see

The past, waits dreaming ever of the past,

Or all the plural pasts: the way a fetus

Dreams vaguely of heaven—waiting, and in its courage

Willing, not only to be born out into

The Actual (with its ambiguous goods),

But to retreat again and be born backwards

Into the gallant walls of its potential,

Its sheltered circle … willing to leave behind,

It might be, carnage.

                                     What shall we keep open—

Where shall we throw our courage, where retreat?

White settlers disembarked here, to embark

Upon a mountain-top of huge potential—

Which for the disembarking slaves was low:

A swamp, or valley of dry bones, where they lay

In labor with a brilliant, strange slave-culture—

All emigrants, ever disembarking. Shall these

Bones live? And in a jangle of confusion

And hunger, from the mountains to the valleys,

They rise; and breathe; and fall in the wind again.