The old black-and-white

Deeper into the trumpeting tattoo.  The sullen weight of atmospheric pressure in these passages (from Once in Paradise) keeps gathering.  The foreboding marks racial, sexual, geo-political tensions.  "Henry Clay" is a nickname for the poem's protagonist, but also a figure out of American history, as storm-clouds gathered before the Civil War.

6

. . . heard himself muttering in the dark. 

Unaccountable black cone of jagged war 

– like a spiralling ashen djinn – wore 

through the skin, leaving an acid blood-mark.

The White House sketched a venereal river 

of chattering teeth squirming in a mask 

through immaterial Mardi Gras.  Ask

not what your country can, Sergeant. Shiver.

Until the vernal Jordan overflows.

White foam, tumbling over golden shoeblack 

into the microphones; a floating shack

out of Arkansas, to the gulf of hexagons, she goes,

a strong brown goo.  And the dust began to blow, 

the fertilizer.  Dried bowls by the Mississippi, 

iron harvesters plowing down the slippery

red Indian mounds – slow, slow.

7

Throw all the acorns into the black account, 

cried Henry Clay, last of the statesmen.

Time flowed through the blurred windowpane. 

Irreversible.  It seemed a blissful river, heaven

sent.  Or just a po wayfarin stranger. 

Depends on your outlook.

Hmmmmm. . . Hmmmmm.. . . rook

to queen's knight's eagle's castle.  Danger.

Shrubbery on the move there, Ahab; 

question for you, iron man. 

Shadow for sundown.

Take these samples to the lab,

cried Henry. The black lab.

And he glanced off through the trees

into surrounding dusk.  A breeze crawled. . . 

scrawled across gray beech bark.  Like a scab.

8

In the darkroom, the old black-and-white 

plays out in spools across a bloody field. 

Something missing. . . the last leg on the shield 

of Malcolm's hurtling emancipation. . . not quite

there yet.  In mordant clay

the old man seals his will and covenant–

Ahab's slave-ship now (a raving cormorant) 

dives after the white inscrutable. Say,

Bluejay, Queequeg, if you can – since 

Henry's finally lost his power of speech

where Pushkin gone?  The fatal touch 

of earthy lips – sealed up his coffin?

Or is there someone waltzing into view 

kings' concupiscence cannot comprehend? 

And missiles miss?  And Henry's hand 

skip over – like a monkey at the zoo?

2.16.98 (President's Day)