How could I forget you, with your peaks
like compound fractures poking through the skin,
your svelte, deciduously fluttering trees
and conifers that bristle, jacked with light
on chilly slopes: blue western mountains
I have flown above but never hiked?
How could I ignore your gainly rivers—
Merrimack and Hudson, Mississippi,
with their slender reefs and ox-bow turns,
Ohio, Delaware, and Susquehanna—
on and on, running with grandiloquent
profusion through the grassy lands? They seem
restrained, for all their grandeur, and as if
they understood their place in commerce even more
than nature and would not obstruct the flow
of goods, unlike unruly counterparts elsewhere:
the Ganges or the Nile, who regularly
drown whole populations, or the useless Congo,
pouring through a smoke of stinging flies,
or the Thames and Seine, content to lie
forever in repose reflecting spires,
flying buttresses, and gargoyle faces
that inspire a nation to adore its past
more than its future, unlike you,
who never gave a whit for history except
as something you could sell as pretty tours
in Williamsburg or Boston—legendary homes
with brassy plaques and monumental stares.
You were always one to yearn toward,
excited by the thought of pure production,
freedom to expand, revise old parts,
create a mall where mills once rattled
through their ten-hour shifts, transform
a dingy tenement to flat and quaint
boutiques, unfazed by barriers of brick
or finance. You advance by instinct, gifted
with a swift, revisionary mind that won’t
let go. I know you by your restlessness
and brooding: smokestacks smudging up the sky,
the ten-lane highways that converge and tangle
in spaghetti loops, the open roads
that make a desert one more backdrop
as the trucks roll by, the buses, cars.
You’re driven by a glad and giddy heart
that’s open to the world and wants the world
to imitate your broad, successful gestures
and be rich as you are, clean and free.
All poverty and weakness hide their eyes
in your hard glare, are driven into corners,
left to mourn or fester out of sight.
I’d know you anywhere, my dashing country,
who can never say enough, who watches me
like Mom, believing that my fate is yours
as well. You let me breathe you and become
your body, linger in your arms, or leave you
for another, far-off country, where
the customs differ and your name is mud.
But then you welcome me, a rebel son
come home again to join the work at hand,
this fond production that becomes a story
you will never read but cherish nonetheless.