Poem America - New English Review

by Martin Burke (July 2012)

For Robert Gibbons, and in mourning for the death of the true American spirit

Already the emptiness grows and America has begun to die so that even if I
planted a tree the ground I planted it in would be useless

Summer says it is winter and I have no means to dispute this

I want it to be winter, I want there to be snow to cover those graves with that
innocence reserved for a Christ-like one gone to an unwarranted death

Perhaps this is the way the world suffered when Shelly died, or when Homer
But no comparison equals a living breath, nor snow equate innocence, nor
silence say what must be said

If I spill enough ink, if I exhaust the book of memory will I be able to say it?

If I make a book of shadows and blank spaces what will it contain?

To have always been the self you always were -a many multitude, a voice as
authentic as the voice of Isaiah (and just as necessary) Biblical
America of the old damnations however was not to your liking

The question then is: how do we make common ground with the past when
that ground has been plundered in so many names that seek to hide a
name?

Yet not to hate, not to be a destroyer stalking the new history, nor to call
condemnation upon those who condemn the earth to pain

But to bring the balm of unchanging necessities to the mouths of singing
children, to make with ink a substance more enduring than shadow
or pain

What will we believe if we will not believe this? Who will we believe if we do
not believe ourselves?

What will we be if we are not the selves we are?

And we walk among them, strangers to intended fruit where prophets are
plentiful but few have authentic voices

So how could you not be everything you were? Vines refused but you did not
refuse, using only as much ink as was necessary to write a living
signature on a page

How does that feel -to have been There? At a Beginning? To be an essential
     witness? Homer and Shelley to a nation seeking its voice, but always
     yourself and only yourself and never the self that might be the self
     some master would approve of

Thus I have had visions which only an Isaiah could put into words, have
washed in the waters of Boston harbour, have laboured in the fields of
every state bordering the circling oceans

How could I not? What else was I born for? If I offer no water to parched
ground what is my worth to the earth?

You also a root -also a vine -seed re-planted for the season of need which
has come upon us

Blake would approve what you approved of and ask no more than that.

Thus there are connections and associations which have no physical equal
in the world yet without which we would be in poverty

Yet what was begun requires a voice, not of recapitulation, but of revelation
-a new Isaiah to move inland, making the landscape a page upon
which he writes in ink no water washes from stone

One day your country will understand my anger is caused by love. It has not
become what it set out to be –but there, there at the core, the fires
resides, and warms

We are talking, are we not, of truth and deception, the oldest argument of
the world, the one Isaiah came to batter –the one that nailed Christ to
the tree

How then could you escape what was waiting for you?

Eventually, and it is already upon us, a Kaddish or a canticle will define the
lives we live and even Robert Lowell will seek out the Pequod though
no one, as yet, has discovered the true Atlantis

From Ahab to Pound you can trace a line which searched for that
cartography –yet what did they find but the coordinates of deception?

This tells us nothing we do not already know: that every vision has its
martyr: that fire burns the hand which holds its flame

Much that was done has been undone but must be re-done if we are to
make our books from more than shadows, shades and ghosts

History happens before it happens.

Like the Greeks we see a certain brightness in the air before the Goddess
appears -something like this stirred the Massachusetts air.

Thus if history be written from Whistler to Pollock, or from Whitman to
Pound –what would be incorrect?

There are undertows of which the surface knows nothing in which a stone
can have more history than the one who casts it into water ever knows

It comes down to listening, watching, keeping your senses alert to the air,
probing the electricity of an age, searching for the generators

An idea within an idea

Something more than geography though geography tells us it is here that X
marks the spot where Jeffers should have built his tower and Kerouac
comes to listen

The tide still comes from Europe but whale-men are no more and either we
light a new flame or are lost in nostalgia

I bring a history the State disputes but cannot refute

Once this happens everything has validity and you need no sanction to
rewrite what has been written

Not pupil to your master-hood but brother to brother at this harbour from
which so many have departed

So who was the goddess who brought the fiery ink to You?

So now, brother to brother, at harbour or homestead, at what other fire will
we dry our wet clothes? The answer will be given when the fire gives
us its flame

A pool shuddered at the mention of the word.

History though it sprung a trap but poetry proved more inventive.

Commerce wrote the text of the State but a laughing juggler came down the
road from Manhattan

Now the pool shuddered like never before.

I am living in Eternity. The ways of this world are the ways
of heaven.

As if Adam re-found Eden (the apple replaced, the damage undone)

History like a kaleidoscope brought to new configurations in which the mind
of Emily Dickinson was a necessity for which there was no other
possibility

There again, and again it will be said, and then re-said again, Eden striking
the prophetic mind to utterance

A gong clanging water-waves, the Pequod responding, even Heart Crane in
his wounds

Harbours

Good to arrive at, better to depart from.
I have found such a one in this continent.
It said: welcome. It said: discover me.
The geography I discover is myself

We are an experiment of time, an adventure of history
This is not a time for a voice to be silent.
Thus I shape my guts, my soul, my soil.
The history I will shape is the history I will write.

Infinity can begin anywhere.
Anywhere begins somewhere.
Why then should I not begin from where I am?
Why should I not begin with who I am?

People were shocked when I wrote my lines.
Which were not poetry according to the standard accepted model.
But a new continent needs new models as expansive as the land.
You think that is astounding?
I can tell you something more astounding.
What if I told you that you could possess the good of the sun and the earth?
What if I told you that there were millions of suns?
What if I told you that you need only spend a day and a night with me
And that you would then possess the origin of all the poems of the world?
What if I told you that you would see all this not with the eyes of the past,
Not with my eyes, but with your own unfiltered vision!

Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full dazzling
And I will give it to you.
I would give a gift to every man, to every woman.
That what articulates the beat of my heart articulates the beats of their hearts.

There is, I think, no other truth worth knowing.

Brother, forgive my discursions and rant

Will we bring them to Boston common? Show them the inheritance that is
theirs for the taking?

Therefore let us make the first of many canticles, let us sing the naked earth
in its full beauty, let us agree that there will be no wasted words in
singing the body electric of woman and man

Easier now to crush the statues than to crush the vision or wipe from
     history the expectations of its poets, or say that Jerusalem or Athens
     has not entered the mind of every man where some have called it
     Atlantis

America dies but America lives

Perhaps Boston was the ground the Buddha sought

Yet now, again, the puritan mind condemns the voice which questions the
     prohibitions as if the Patriot Act served a need too sinister to be
Trust the people? No government has, no government will, yet masters
     beware: Amherst stirs a
     million minds, heresy has its believers

Even so, there are destroyers stalking the world with a purpose as old as my
purpose is, so history –where does it begin -with Adam or Antigone?

Whitman begat me but no system binds me -so now which Jerusalem, and
whose?

I spatter ink upon the ghosts who occupy this page

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