Leisler's Rebellion

The omphalos: history’s
Blind adit to the core.
I often feel it should be
An erogenous zone. It is not.
But here is a wood artery
Once soft with blood, where
The human budded like a rose.
Each cell records
Its measure from this navel,
As all roads come from Rome.
What would Tarquin make
Of Caesar? Caesar, of
Justinian? Jacob Leisler,
In 1689,
A rich German merchant,
Amidst the untergang
Of the Dominion of New England—
(Our last good government),
Made his own revolution
And was king of New York
Near two years; then was
Arrested after a short siege,
Hanged, drawn and quartered
By the new Whig regime,
Stretching out its naval arm.
His clogs scraped the cobbles
Where I stand; his ships
Clipped the river at my feet.
If ten men in Manhattan
Know Leisler’s name, none
Of them is under forty.
You might even think
I made this Leisler up! History,
Never the grateful child,
Uncareful with her trust fund.
“This is the unstable world
And we unstable in it.”
My unstable Pacific eye,
Unused to the craton, sees
Unreinforced masonry—
A brick is stroke in the air,
A street prepared to leap,
At a little cough of earth,
In piles on itself—but not,
Whatever name we call it,
The Dominion of New England—
On its hard Atlantic plate, where
Brick will carry brick forever.
Seduced by the dry navel
Of an innocent continent,
Men came here to build,
Built themselves, and died;
Built the center of a world,
Broke the proud and spared
The conquered. Then died.
Are we our fathers? Or
Only the crabs in their shells?
Their ornamental parapets,
Forty feet up and ninety
Years old, crackle
With potential energy.
The center is where they left it,
Plugged to this desert artery.
It is never too late to submit.