The Seuss stone-pines;
The pattern sidewalks
Of rock-print chips,
Quarried black and white,
Laid as work-relief;
The cork-oaks, ripped
Black to the waist—relic
Of whimsy time, doomed
By efficient Stelvin cap—
Every heritance asks:
If this thing did not exist—
Wine plugged with bark?—
Who would now invent it?
A devise for any Sunday.
Who should invent Portugal?
“California, with better
Wine and more mosquitoes”—
Yet yesterday beneath
The rococo altar
Of St. Jerome, fifty
Foot tall and filigreed
In holy marble-gold,
Fruit of the wet east
From centuries of sailor-
Soldier-monks—shooting
My daughter’s imitation
Of painted Christ above,
A flat-armed heathen
Of cackled teenage mock—
I asked, silent for we
Unspeak though you bear
Morning’s new flesh,
Dart flung to stab
My heart and mine alone—
“Of your art-friends, whom
Hath made a thing like this?”
Nunca! Yet neither I,
Though “art and invention
Steer my pen”—the Virgil
Of Mountain View yet
Unborn and never born,
Aborted with a legal pill
Or lonely in first grade.
The present stays epic.
Its poets sell trifles,
Blogposts, tweets—
Pastries of cheap text,
A little living death.
Why should I be better?
I am not. You are here
And you are not—we are not—
Schrodinger’s wedding,
Some Chinese clone
Of past and silver urn,
As perfect as impossible.
“I have no daughter. I desire
None.” I have no wife…
If this us did not exist
Who would invent it? You
Would not; I could not;
You bent and I weak,
Just beetles on the skull
Of this stranger empire
That time and sea forgot.
Christ is laughing at me.
Christ is laughing at us
Who will never reck him,
Who wander under bones,
Taking pictures with our phones.
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