“Fucking poem.”
She stares at him. At the word he’s unleashed between them. Begging her to haul off and slap him. Wash his mouth out with soap. Needs her to rise up, a fury of parental force, indignant, undiminished, stronger than ever. To let him know in no uncertain terms that there’ll be no getting away with murder, just because she’s history.
Even here, she fails him. “Let’s see,” she says, quietly. Takes the chair beside him.
He will not shove her the book. Does not move either toward her or away. Just sits there, like a stone saint of incoherence, pilloried.
She gathers in the anthology, already beaten to felt by generations of seventh graders. A Nation’s Many Voices. How many nations, made and unmade, since she had to read Longfellow. Since anyone has read Longfellow.
She flips through the alien, new earth. All the new women and Indians. All too late, too long after the fact. They’ll put the poems in the book, sure. But no one’s going to give back the 1.2 acres with lovely older structure they just spent their future to acquire.
“Where are you?” she asks him, already lost.
He spits a violent airburst through his lips and hurls one uncomprehending palm shoulderward. The hand drops to the book, still protesting its innocence. It roots out the offending text like a dog after badgers. His finger freezes, pointing. A guiltless martyr to Whitman.
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” She remembers it vaguely. It seems to be a four-page, hundred-fifty-line poem genetically engineered and irradiated for both freakish size and an unnatural shelf life. It must have slipped into this child’s anthology through some complex scheme of laundered literary kickbacks.
She tries to negotiate with the monster at her son’s gates. Flood-tide below me! . . . Clouds of the west . . . Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!
Somebody has gone completely stark raving. Make that three people: the poet, the editor who included it, and the sadist teacher who has assigned it.
“Oh, honey!” . . . you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence . . . “What are you supposed to do with it?”
Do? He stares at her, blankly. Oh. The assignment. Trash the assignment. Not even worth kidding oneself over. “Supposed to say what it’s fucking about.”
“Tim. That’s enough. Now. I mean it.” Mean what? Mean: stop saying that word you know I can’t make you stop saying.
“Come on,” she tells him. “Whistle while we work.” How bad can things be, really? Surely a kid faces harder things in this world than poetry.
Still: The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others. Not exactly what Laura bargained for. She was never very good with words. Always hated English, social studies, all those invented topics. She couldn’t wait to become an adult. When things would be real.
She stares at the commodity stretching across these pages. Somehow, she’s become a working adult. Somewhere, she’s learned: nobody makes a living. There are no other topics but these impenetrable, urgent fakes.
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west . . . Fifty years hence, she reads. She has to take the poet’s word for it. It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not.
She hasn’t the first clue. It’s like doing some kind of Martian archaeology. She’s in badly over her head. She looks at the page for something to say. Her son stares at her.
She might have liked the stuff, if only she’d had the time for it. Once, at twenty, she memorized a Dylan Thomas that electrified her. One that promised all the comfort she needed to keep herself afloat when her hour came. She stored it up, her maximum armor. No harm could have the upper hand, so long as she recalled those transforming words. Recalled, and stayed twenty.
She tries them now, in her mind. A jingle, the height of irrelevant adolescence. She imagines herself declaiming to her oncologist. Reciting for the night nurse who handled her bedpan, the bored candy striper who brought her Jell-O on the polyethylene tray. Up the morphine a smidge, while I rage against the dying of the light.
Someone wrote her poems, once. Ancient history, now. That boy who fell for her, when she went back to school. Took her for one of the callow bobbysoxers she shared a locker with. Refused to see the obvious: that she had two kids old enough to be this kid’s kid sister and brother. Shy, ugly, anemic. And he wrote her a whole sequence of, were they actually sonnets? Laura by morning, noon, and night.
She kept them for a couple of years, to spite first Don and later Ken. Saved them in the jewel box with her dad’s old sapphire tie tack. Because the only other lines men had ever given her were apologies.
Tim drums on the table. A nervous, driving grunge beat, ready to explode. She tries to read faster. But the faster she goes, the less she gets. She cannot hear the words above her son’s table-thumping. A hard sell, Tim. Like one of those house-hunters, desperate for you to read his mind, figure his every need, and fix him up with perfect lifetime lodgings, today or sooner.
I am with you, the dead man says. And know how it is. Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt, Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd, Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d, Just as you stand and lean on the rail . . .
Now she remembers this guy: a long-winded, total mystery. Even back then, way back when she was in peak explicating form. Big, bearded guy, a vaguely menacing Santa whose endless diatribes always bored her stiff and hurt her head. On and on, the numbing catalogs, every line beginning the same, trying to reassure the reader that he hasn’t wandered off entirely.
She remembers something about the poet’s sexual inclinations. “Is the teacher who gave you this a man or a woman?”
Tim snorts. “Nobody’s really sure.”
Modulo arithmetic would be easier. Analytical statistics. Linear programming. But this is Laura’s penance, her act of contrition. Here: these endless repetitions, the man-loving man droning on about nothing anyone can make out. The perennial miscalculation of a teacher’s last gift before summer vacation.
She will tell her kid all the wrong answers. Hopelessly muddle these lines for him, forever. She will bring down the wrath of education on him, cost him the college of his choice. But she will at least sit with him now, today, while sitting is still possible, until the verse is done.
“He seems . . . He’s trying to talk with everyone who is ever going to be taking this boat. The boat he’s taking. People fifty years later.” A hundred. Or ever so many hundreds of years from now.
“Well? What’s up with that?” Who the fuck takes boats anywhere?
“This ferry in New York, in eighteen fifty-something. Six. He’s trying to imagine . . . all these lives. All these different times. All occupying the same place.”
“Why?”
Why? She flips back through the poem. Her end-of-term exam. Surely the answer must be in here, somewhere.
I . . . Saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies and left the rest in strong shadow . . . Look’d on the haze . . . on the vapor . . . The white wake left by the passage . . . The flags of all nations . . . I alone come back to tell you.
“Because . . .” she stalls. “Because he . . .”
Because this day’s rush stands still and means nothing. Because we are all crossing from nowhere to nowhere. Each fluke life packed on this deck, lost, like every other. These and all else were to me the same as they are to you . . . What is it then . . . the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?
She asks him hoarsely, “She wants you to say what it means?”
That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I should be of my body. His teacher cannot possibly know what the poem means. Not unless his teacher is already sick. Unless she, too, already has the aeril view. Her own tumor.
“Forget it,” Tim sulks. “I’ll take the F. Let the bitch kick me out of school on my ass.”
So be it. What does it matter, the future? Nothing. Everything. She won’t be there. Teacher won’t be there. Nor Tim, for that matter. The poet didn’t even make it this far.
She looks down at the dead page. He’s still at it. Interminable farewell catalog. The dark threw its patches down upon me also. Upon him? Also. She reaches across the dark patches, cuffs her cub behind his ear.
“Fucking auto mechanic?” Mom asks.
He looks up, dazed. Then he grins, smirks in misery. “Forget that noise. I’m starting my own company.”
“Software?”
She gazes down over the rail at a bottle message, a world where even words are once again a growth industry. Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! . . . Thrive, cities—bring your freight, bring your shows . . .
“Software,” he cackles.
“Sure,” she tells him. Expand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual, Keep your places, objects than which none else is more lasting. “Great idea. You’ll clean up. Make a mint.”
We use you, you objects, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us, We fathom you not—we love you . . . You furnish your parts toward eternity . . .
“Just remember to support your mother, in her old age?”
AN UNDERGROUND RIVER
Under the ground a River went,
A River went, a River went,
And folk in towns were well content
For underground a River went,
To fill the bathtub brimming up,
To wash the streets, to wet the green,
To fill the jug, to fill the cup,
To wash the clothes and dishes clean.
Under the ground a River went,
And folk in towns were well content.
—GRACE T. HALLOCK, A Tale of Soap and Water
On that evening when Dorcas cowered with Samuel in their upper room, Resolve’s wife, Julia, busied herself with her own imminent arrival. While Dorcas Clare waited, doomed by a pamphlet announcing the arrival of Christ embodied, Julia Hazelwood Clare labored over a pamphlet of her own, one agitating for the annexation of Texas. She prayed in print that God would match the nation with an hour worthy of it. Hope for an American future lay in War with Mexico.
The Rio Grande marked but one of the frontiers Julia advanced upon that evening. In the business of print, she’d long before learned that her words sold in proportion to their audacity. Readers throughout town awaited the next stroke of her boldness, few if any realizing that “J. H. Clare” was one sprung precociously from the captivity of her sex.
Had Resolve been able, he would have bottled the woman’s insights and peddled them through retail channels. He loved the low overhead his affiliate brought with her. All she needed to carry out her calling was something to make a mark, a place to sit, and a woman to raise the children that her husband got her with.
J. H. Clare spent little energy defending the rights of women to walk on hind legs. Not that she feared detection: the problem simply required too brute a solution to hold her interest for long. She saved her keenest syntax for two chief addictions: democratic vistas and the Machine.
She nursed an incurable weakness for ingenuity. The steamship was her Hermes, the arc lamp her Apollo. She promoted the extension of the National Road between the Virginia coast and Columbus, Ohio. She rhapsodized for three dense pages on the virtues of the Whitworth system of screw threading. She urged all her devotees to have their portraits taken with the new imaging lenses.
But for J. H. Clare, the engine that most sped civilization toward its providential future was the telegraph. In early editorials, she praised that obeisant electromagnet as the shatterer of the rules of space under which the old world operated. She relayed with approval Richard Henry Dana’s words, “This is incredible. My faith is staggered!” But where the average journalist took to electrified stuttering, Julia announced mankind’s deliverance from scarcity, ignorance, waste, and chaos.
Prior to this metaphysical invention, Washington and Baltimore stood sundered in their knowledge of each other by a fixed forty-mile ride. Rail drastically cut this barrier, but could not remove the vicissitudes of passage. Then the fateful, steely finger on the Capitol floor moved its distant mate in the B&O station office in ghostly synchrony. Time was dead; things could be known in the moment they happened.
The dull click of the coil carried for Julia all the charged declaration of religious awe. The flat affect of indifferent dot and dash flowed forth in a magnetic magnificat. In Julia’s gospel account, the brace of codes flushed into the open air became democracy’s duck shoot. She counted her readers blessed to be present on creation’s eighth day. Yet the first utterance to travel across the wires struck her as almost irrelevant.
Yes, the Divinity had chosen that moment to revise the rules of His firmament. But What hath God wrought!—a text proposed to Morse by a woman—framed too humble an exclamation. For God’s work was as nothing compared to what America meant to do now with her Promethean fire.
God, with the help of man, had thrown open a hidden portal in the side of distance. America had destroyed in one key-tap the baffles that had for so long checked the human race. Place, locale, no longer made one jot of difference. The mere existence of the device threw open to expansion the whole compass rose.
For how many eons had insurmountable geography impeded man’s business? Now the new American race had burst those shackles. Now it could couple its energies in one overarching corporation, one integrated instrument of production whose bounty might grow beyond thwarting.
Here was the fabled, self-refilling magic beaker. The entire country could grow rich on a fraction of its prior labor. Every mile of wire produced enough surplus advantage to pay for the wiring of another mile. At wiring’s end, all the wealth left over would better us beyond imagining.
Julia composed repeated editorial paeans to the breeding of electric messages. She compared their proliferation to the golden propagation of wheat: one seed turned itself into ten. Ten became a thousand. Only now the force of the sun and the fuse of the rain lay entirely in our hands. And the sower no longer had to make the choice between today’s enjoyment and tomorrow’s growth. Seed corn and feed corn were one and the same.
These delirious proclamations brought fire from various quarters. George Templeton Strong ruthlessly mocked her “millennium of gutta percha and copper wire” well into the fifties, delighting as J. H. Clare’s pet Transatlantic Cable dissolved under the pressure of “superincumbent water.” The strangest of bedfellows joined Strong in this attack on Julia’s optimism. Henry Thoreau sniffed:
We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough . . .
But Julia lived longest and laughed last. The first message to span the globe in a fraction of a second was, she granted, a bit of bombast: Queen Victoria opened the link to her apostate colonies by proclaiming, “Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth, good will to men.” Yet hard on the heels of this fatuousness came the first utterance of substance. John Cash, a London merchant, cabled his New York agent the immortal words “Go to Chicago.”
But years before that transatlantic drama unfolded, J. H. Clare already saw the spark of America’s technology ignite her politics. This noble experiment of enlightened self-government had awaited just this moment when its virtues could be dispersed through virgin territory by rail and wire. Steam and the factory system diffused a material well-being through those lower echelons of society upon whom the miracle of the vote depended. Steam-driven mills might make a Republic whose Capitol would be just as self-propagating as the industrial capital that forged it.
Industry’s raw inputs were endless, the land fecund enough for any machine dream. And where favor had stinted in natural advantage, agricultural chemistry now offered a way to sow yesterday’
s dragon teeth and reap tomorrow’s reconstituted legions. The Go-Ahead age managed, as Emerson said:
by means of a teaspoonful of artificial guano, to turn a sandbank into corn.
Clearly, civilization’s torch had passed to the North American Rome. But as with any healthy new soap works, the Republic of Invention had to grow to prosper. Julia’s mental map of the country bleached toward one inevitable hue, filling out its natural borders between the Rio Grande and 54°40'.
She did not spoil for a fight, but neither did she shrink from it. A readiness to come to blows was the best way to avoid having to do so. The American Diplomat, at seventy years, was now old enough to negotiate from strength to strength. A nation come of age possessed no greater peacemaker than power.
“For whom was this continent meant,” Julia wrote, “if not those most capable of developing it?” Prosperity was its own legitimization. The harvest of America fell to those best able to process the windfall. America’s very bloom called out for the country to take up her rightful borders.
The call for Texas made Julia the Democrats’ unlikely mouthpiece. But her husband forgave her the alliance, too busy prospering to worry much about Jackson’s heirs. Resolve left the political pennies to his wife, preferring to mind manufacturing’s pounds. He trusted she would, ultimately, look out for the works’ best interests.
When the Mexican War at last broke out, Julia hugged its opportunity. J. H. Clare grew famous as the analyst of the assault upon Mexico City. She discredited the reports of invisible Mexican guerrillas sniping upon our troops and disappearing down arroyos into the undergrowth. Such were the invented phantoms of psyches too terrified to face the future. And those well-meaning senators who condemned the war as immoral managed only to give aid and comfort to our enemies.
Outcome, as always, proved the morality of her cause. She deeded the war’s last word to that American captain who said, “I knew I could not be wrong, so long as the enemy in large numbers were ahead.”
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