Ship of state, hightide rising
carries you off again, far
from land. When you packed
black traffic
to Virginia’s shore, whole
cloth expanded under blue
heaven. New England’s
enlightened
gentry constituted you
of stout pine and steam-bent oak
for the seasonal
hurricane
but not to withstand the rage
that your cargo turns on you
as you divagate
uncaptained
on the greedy fitful winds
of your final century.
I beg you to sink
abruptly.
Or say: We catch sight of you through the rain
and wind, Yankee clipper, as the tide’s
defeat carries you off your mooring and out
to sea—from the Museum of Clear Ideas
into twenty-foot waves of Atlantic rubbish.
You’re unfit for traffic, Philosophe, which is all
you were fitted out for. Where the wind leans,
your rational rudder takes you—the wind
is your helmsman—and neither intelligence nor will
takes passage with you, who were constructed for
eternity and Philadelphia by the reasonable will.
Or say it as
Officer Zero:
ship of state, shit.
We assert an
historical
decline and fall
to deny our
own shipwreck. Why
does it require
sixty years to
discover that
it’s the leaky
rowboat of the
self that founders
in the always
ruinous sea?