Tilting Point

                                                                          For Peter Dale Scott

Dear (if I may) Peter: your words have struck home:

If there is any home still standing

Or any peace we may earn

    After unleashing anonymous war.

Love, you write, has a problem with knowledge.

And this is the source of our destruction.

Yet in Dante---Sapientia and Amor

Jointly rule divine dispensation:

Therefore love cannot be blind

But waxes with its object,

Whitman’s contraction notwithstanding:

Love and knowledge are one.

Such love is ecstatic, not rational---

The old lie of Los lost in Ulro

Collapse of brotherhood

The holy offering of self for self---

Priests of Self and State

Have taught men hypocritic turpitude:

Not to annihilate self

 In Satan’s holiness---

A people self-ruled and self-disciplined

From the royal way cannot turn.

Nor lose Declaration or Constitution,

Mere words if not heart-heeded deeds. 

You see that I preach:

Like those voices crackling over radios:

The lot of monks and hermits

Drawn like moths to the flame.

And whether it changes a thing

Is not germane:

For bodies in a lascivious swirling tide

Require no persuasion.

Past suffering does not atone

For present pointless suffering

When ignorance and decay

   Rule the people.

We always knew

The people and land they love

Once belonged to another race

Now cloying clay.

We always knew our love

Made us suspect

To other inheritors

 Waiting in the wing.

Feed the fire! More fiercely feed the flame!

The ashes of one State

Will fertilize the mind

     Of other States to come---

States where desire is not mocked

By being liberated,

Nor mind made joyless

By mechanism:

Nor Universities sold to Corporations,

The civil state

Reduced to servile wards

Enriching and impoverished!

Our permissive Eden

  Is choked with smog.

Gaudy houses high on ridges

 Look down in confused contempt.

There is too much money

And never enough

Where bankers rule

And craven politicians crave;

Where scholars of war

Find moral right

In self-serving armies

And freelance murder.

Too much has become too little

The glut eroding

All commonality, all belief,

All lasting word and deed.

Are we any longer suited

To Democracy?

Can the people any more

Deliberate and discern?

  

What would they have

Could they turn-off the television?

What have they accomplished

When otherwise occupied?

Centuries wasted over words!

“Divine Right of Kings”

“Christian”

“Empire”

“Communism”“Capitalism”

No one knew what these meant.

Yet the planet

 Almost succumbed!

Is this a reason

  To believe in politics?

Or a reason

To judge politics deranged?

The more we cling

To the names of things

Forgetting their essence

The worse it gets.

And the more we succeed

At Empire the emptier we become;

So if we are schizophrenic

We nonetheless cooperate!

If we are bent out of shape

When we struggle to be virtuous,

Perhaps our virtue is poison

And it is time for action. 

What action? To love America!

To love the vanished rivers we tried to save!

To love the stupefied Congress

The button-down lobbyist

Churls along the corridor;

To love the careful orchestration

Of Presidents and secrets

Bearing witness to our grandeur:

Straight from central-casting

That cannot be bettered, only imitated

Over and again

Like the hollow croaking of a toad!

To love the murderous police

(God bless them for their service, or they might shoot!)

And all the vanished witnesses:

  ---To forgive the innocent assassin his deed---

Do not cling to the thing named!

Do not imagine man perfectible.

It is enough that one man has kindness

Or cultivates understanding.

Marvel rather that he exists

In space-time inexplicable

Briefly above his grave

In the glory of the word.

But if it comes

To that charming sophism

That God favors us:

Let me out of the room.

What have we accomplished?

Where are we?

All we really know:

Is that nobility is hard-won.

This will not tell us, however,

Why the word Bankers

Makes reasonable people

Defensive or insane

Or causes them to reply

With a phrases like: The Illuminati.

But the technique

Is tried and true.

To deny the truth

It is only necessary

To dupe the mass

By their own prejudice,

Blinding them

 While picking their pocket.

Soaking away

Their natural wealth.

Aliens! Not from another planet

But from our own!

Kind, normal people

Mad as a maelstrom!

And yet I confess:

I love American trees:

Sturdy Oak, grimacing Magnolia

Brooding Hemlock 

All these were loved by

By John James Audubon

And every bird

   Rendered larger than houses or men!

But art cannot save trees

Or rivers

Or land from the mighty-dollar:

All fall before private-profit.

And what is poetry

That does not save nations or peoples?

Poetry is a tool of art

That may not succeed.

A tool is only a means

To perform a task,

To set men free

  To work a greater-good.

And as for that gentle America---

I’m afraid

It was nothing but Technicolor

  And genteel guitars,

Doubtless real in its way:

Fewer people, plenty of space

More mercy, less madness,

Above all---more time.

As Thomas Wolfe wrote:

It will not come again:

It shall not come again

Old grieved ghost.

  

The old-actor bowdlerized us---

Told us to believe in anything we wish

And The Printer of Udell’s

Became his Faith and Revelation.

Delusional but accurate

If you see

That all is pretext

For the gold of any goal.

The hero was clandestine, pure

Not drunk

Astonishing real

In the face of a drunken world---

This too is America:

Land of illusions

And disillusions

 Leading ever-upward to the light.

The moral is:

The world can be

Just as you want it

Even if it is not,

Even if, even if

What you imagine

Never quite

Makes it so!

Likewise Patriotism

Never impresses Patriots

Who are all too compelled

To pay liberty’s price.

  

There is a painting by Breughel

Called:  Hunters in the Snow.

It depicts Hunters returning

To their home

As a vast snowscape

Opens before them:

A country of fire and ice,

Where Skaters disport.

There is no overt religion

Except a distant steeple

To interrupt men wending their way

 Through a European winter.

What is it that America requires?

What will she have?

What does she lack?

She lacks

What the painting depicts:

A cultivated space,

Energy but simplicity:

America bereft of grace.

Yet I think of you Walt Whitman

Herman Melville

In the roughhouse untamed

That drew a frail-exile

Named David Herbert Lawrence

To the Ponderosa pines of the Sangre-Cristo

Where, breathing easier,

He sat at his desk and wrote:

“Moby Dick inspires

an awesome silence in the soul.”

Thus America

For its Immigrants:

Yet without pens

And with no authority

The so-called powerful shake

Liberty’s expired trunk!

Scrounging a few ions of light

Stolen from the people

In order to complete

 Their dark project.

In the cold corridors of space

Where endless enemies flourish;

Within the hollow-eyed mask

Bolting heedlessly forward

Oedipus, King of Thebes,

Flies furious

Over each intelligent stone

 That tries to prevent his doom.

    

Will Morgan

                                                 September 20, 2015