Dawn
A man and a woman are driving across the Great Plains of North America.
Kansas. Saskatchewan. South Dakota.
They are hundreds of miles into their journey, cocooned by speed and metal and dusk, a chrysalis of solitude and cobalt distance. They are bodiless and encapsulated as astronauts approaching the moons of Jupiter,
their radio emits a voice-storm of signals and significant noise,
by the dashboard light they can just make out the markings on the map, a grave rubbing or ghostly palimpsest,
scrim as fine as angel’s hair or the latticed veins of tangerines,
images and symbols which admit of no single probable answer but function as a kind of orchestral score for the landscape sweeping invisibly past,
a notational logic of the possible.
Hiss of tires, rush of wind, cardinal hush and ordinal thrum.
Toward dawn the radio begins another cycle.
Everything is exactly as it was. They have outdistanced the stars and the plains are just as silent, gravid, ineluctable. They have received the hieratic lunar mysteries, they possess the blueprints of a thousand civilizations.
They stop the car and get out.
In the first, ashen light shapes and templates begin to appear.
A horse, a flock of doves, windrows of trees between the freshly plowed fields, distant cathedrals of grain elevators rising from the mist.
They have everything they need to create the world.
They have only to join hands. They have only to choose.
Part Four
An Odyssey of Appetite
* * *
America’s hunger takes nothing for granted.
Ants hollowing fallen fruit,
recasting the temple of the pomegranate,
mice in their congress of grain, squirrels in the heart
of a deciduous continental democracy,
mountains scored by rivulets,
granite beds, plains of salt or river clay,
subduction and production and consumption
driven by the master narrative of orogeny,
magma become lava in the instant of eruption
as a chocolate egg ruptures its shell of golden foil
in a hand that might belong to young Tom Jefferson
pursuing the butterfly of his happiness, or
Benjamin Franklin flying a kite,
or the daydreaming machinist Henry Ford
inventing the mass-market,
or you, or me, or everyone, or no one.
America’s epic is the odyssey of appetite.
* * *
The Genius of Industry
Lay me on an anvil, O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.
—CARL SANDBURG
Lost in the Wilderness,
crouched in the underbrush as the flames approached,
the rattle of muskets mingling with the cries of the wounded
caught in the creeping wildfires and burned to death,
the blindness of days
pushing further into that miasma of killing,
the men were left with little to ponder
but the character of their new Commanding General,
Ulysses S. Grant.
Surely, so the talk went
in the camp of the 5th Michigan
and the 9th New Hampshire, the 21st Ohio
and Indiana’s famous Iron Brigade,
surely he would retreat.
Faced with this indecisive firefight,
thickets of scrub oak in hidden gulches,
heavy losses on both sides,
the danger of a sudden reversal
as at Chancellorsville,
surely Grant would retreat
like all the others—
McClellan and Burnside, Hooker and Pope—
move back to Washington and resupply,
prepare to fight it out again next month, or next season,
or next spring. It was only common sense.
And in the days and weeks that followed—
cold marches through the woods of Virginia,
the Bloody Angle of Spotsylvania,
the two armies locked together day and night,
grinding the life from each other
like implacable lovers—
as the men discovered that Grant would not retreat,
that Grant meant relentless battle,
it could be said that America
discovered its particular genius:
getting down to business.
As personified in Sam Grant,
a smallish, red-bearded man
seated beneath an oak tree in a dirty uniform
whittling a stick into smaller
and smaller pieces, making nothing,
it was a genius for death.
In that final struggle of the war,
a continual, yearlong skirmish from the Wilderness
to its conclusion, a sort of square dance where
the partners rushed out and fired
round after round
from twenty paces beneath a bright sun,
new men stepping up
to take the place of the fallen
while the caller whistled out directions,
do-si-do and promenade,
it was Grant who called the tune, relentlessly
and without mercy. It took the North
four years for Lincoln to find Grant,
hidden away in the heartland
getting drunk and winning battles,
and bring him east to end it.
I need this man, old bloody-handed Abe said.
He knows how to fight. He knew
that victory meant getting down to
the job at hand; meant relentless pressure;
meant “the maximization of the numerical advantage
and the superior productive capacity of the North.”
Most of all, he knew that victory meant death,
a new, fully modern kind of death,
an industrialized democracy of killing
in the muddy siegeworks and trenches around Petersburg,
at the fords along the Pamunkey and Rappahannock,
in the slaughter at Cold Harbor
and the crossroads at Five Forks,
the last footrace with Lee’s starving men
ending finally beneath the dogwoods of Appomattox
in the victory not so much of one general,
or even one army, as of a particular vision of America,
an ideology just coming into its own.
Across the distance of a century
we can see that this is what matters,
not so much the man himself
as what he signifies—though Grant
is so perfectly American,
his pragmatic strength and paradoxical weaknesses,
the love of booze and horses and cheap cigars.
Ulysses Grant was to warfare
what Henry Ford was to the automobile.
And as the military purists
even today resent Grant’s lack of subtlety,
the absence of Napoleonic finesse,
we imagine the dismay
of the fine craftsmen of the Old World
laboring over their hand-tooled
products, self-righteous and scornful
of the Model T’s rolling off the assembly line
and Ford thinking fuck them
I want to rule the world.
As after the war Grant’s lieutenants,
Sherman and Sheridan, scoured the West
turning bad Indians into good ones, taming
the wilderness, making the world safe for democracy;
thus was Montana made safe for the Great Northern Railroad,
immigrants conned into settling by such extravagant claims
that the Dakotas came to be known as “Jay Cooke’s Banana Belt”;
&n
bsp; thus the plains were settled and cities arose in the desert;
thus were cartels born; thus were bubbles burst;
thus General Motors and the rubber industry
got together with John D. Rockefeller
to purchase the Los Angeles interurban transit system,
one of the most modern and extensive in the country,
and dismantled it, as a public service, so that
the automobile—“the future of America”—
should have less disruptive competition,
in the process making millions for themselves at the expense
of the general public, which after all is the definition
of a great Capitalist. And O, the beautiful freeways,
the Santa Monica and the Long Beach and the San Diego!
Phoenix and Los Angeles as much a part of it
as Detroit or Pittsburgh with their
smelters and rolling mills and slag heaps,
strip mining in West Virginia
and strings of motels like diamonds in the desert
outside Gallup, New Mexico,
everything a product of the cultural assembly line.
Because it wasn’t so much the machines themselves—
though the power of those cogs and wheels
to dehumanize the average Joe
should not be underestimated—
as it was a new idiom,
a new pace to American life, an endless refinement
down to some replicable pattern,
an industrialized essence,
as William Carlos Williams
hammered out language, manufacturing a poetry
pure as circuit boards. A rhythm,
waves lapping the shore of Lake Michigan
as you head south along the Drive, south
into the industrial belt,
Hammond, Gary, East Chicago,
the gas jets of the refineries, smokestacks gushing steam,
a million naked bulbs in the white glow
of phosphorus, the rumble of machinery,
sky bruised orange by the roar of production.
Or sailing up the Mississippi after dusk
between banks alive with petroleum plants,
the cabled towers of relay stations
and chemical storage facilities,
bright as day all night and
all the way up to Baton Rouge
where the giant snake-headed hoses
load corn into the deep holds of the freighter,
a mountain of chipped yellow grain,
and the fine, powdery residue
turning the cranes
and all the sailors white, dust—
corn dust—that gums your eyes shut,
an overpowering taste
that will linger all the way to Veracruz.
That afternoon, after loading, the ship
puts about and runs south, pale as talcum,
nestling deep into the water with its new weight.
By day the riverbanks are Amazonian.
The warehouses and lading bays
without their blinding electrical eyes
seem inconsequential, lost against the swampy horizon,
Louisiana sweeping past hour by hour
as you crouch hammering rust from the hull,
hearing the waters part before you,
the intonations of the mallets
on the thick steel plates, a dull ringing
of calloused hands hammering steadily
beneath the white sun while each stroke
raises a cloud of rust chips into your face
and the dragonflies settle by the hundreds
to bask on the hot metal of the deck
and then rise again at each reverberation,
rising and falling to the beat of the hammers,
the whole insect mass like an emerald
and turquoise lung, rising and falling,
the pulse of a primordial engine.
Almond Blossoms, Rock and Roll, the Past Seen as Burning Fields
Across the highlands farmers are burning their fields
in the darkness. The fleet, infernal silhouettes of these men
and the owl-swift birds scared up from the chaff
flicker briefly against the silken curtain of flame as we pass,
an image from Goya cast once before our eyes
to be lost as the road swerves up to alabaster
groves of olives and white-knuckled almendros.
Hungry, exhausted, driving all night, there are four of us
hunched in the shell of the beaten, graffiti-winged Bug
that we scalped for sixty dollars in Berlin,
no shocks, bald tires, a broken starter so that
we have to pop the clutch every time, dashing like fools
through the streets of Amsterdam and Barcelona—
Hank with no accent, Dave with no license
except for his beard, Ed with the box turned all the way up,
playing over and over the only two tapes we have left
since the night of the lurid Basque luau
and street riot in San Sebastián. For whatever reason
we are insanely happy. Wild and lost, speed-mad,
high on the stale bread and cold ravioli we’ve eaten for days,
giddy with smoke and the echoes of flame leading south,
El Greco fingers of chalk blue and turtledove moonlight
rock and roll working its harmonic convergence,
odor of diesel and wild cherry, almond blossoms
settling like ash to the asphalt—No. Wait.
It wasn’t four. There were three of us left
after Hank stayed behind with that girl in Madrid.
And it was ash. Just there, where the highway
carried the flame’s liquid insignia, an ash-blizzard
swirled and impelled itself irretrievably
into the melted tar. It was like a county road in Colorado
I once drove, coming to a place where milkweed
or dandelion spores confounded the air
and fell into the fresh-laid blacktop, embedded there,
fossilized, become the antediluvian kingdom
another era must decode. For us, all of Spain was like
anywhere else, driving the Great Plains or Inland Empire,
Los Banos, Buttonwillow, Bakersfield,
familiar rhythm and cadence of the road,
another car, another continent, another rope of lights
slung the length of the San Joaquin Valley.
I don’t know if the rush we felt was culturally specific,
though it was the literal noise of our culture we rode
like Vandals or Moors toward a distant sea,
but that feeling was all we ever desired, that freedom
to hurtle madly against the sweet, forgiving flesh of the world,
urged on by stars and wind and music,
kindred spirits of the night. How the past
overwhelms us, violent as floodwaters, vivid as war.
Now Ed wears a suit and tie, Dave deals used cars
in L.A., “pushing iron,” as the salesmen say.
My wife and I walk home from the grocery store
through streets of squirrels and school buses
bathed in late October sunlight, musky odor of paper bags
and fresh cheese bread from the Baltic bakery,
when the smell of someone incinerating fallen leaves
brings back a landscape of orchards and windmills,
the inscrutable plains of Castile and Estremadura.
I don’t even know what they were burning out there
but it must have been the end
of the season. The symphony of years glissades
like tractors tracing figure eights across a muddy slope,
sweep and
lull of machetes in the sugar fields,
Fiji or Jamaica, places Elizabeth and I have traveled since,
smelled the candied stink of smoldering cane.
But what concerns me most is not so much the smoke,
the resin and ash of human loss,
but rather how glibly and with what myopia
we bore the mantle of individual liberty across the continents,
as if our empowerment entailed no sacrifice in kind,
no weight of responsibility. I guess it was a sign
of the times. That jingoistic, reelection year
a spirit of such complacent self-congratulation reigned
that even Paris seemed a refuge from the hubris.
At the Olympic ceremonies in Los Angeles
they chose to reenact the national epic, westward
expansion, only due to certain staging restrictions
the covered wagons full of unflappable coeds
rolled from west to east, a trivial, barely noticed flaw.
It is America’s peculiar gift and burden, this liberation
from the shackles of history. And we were such avatars.
We took what was given and thought, in all innocence,
that the casual largesse we displayed in return
was enough. When we parked for good in Algeciras
we left the doors unlocked, key in the ignition.
You see, the brakes were gone and it wasn’t our country.
Immense in the heat-shadowed distance loomed
the glittering, mysterious mountains of Africa,
and though we stood in the very shadow of the Rock of Gibraltar
we never even noticed it. That’s how I picture us still,
me and Ed and Dave on the ferry to Tangier,
laughing in our sunglasses, forgetting to look back.
Commodity Fetishism in the White City
Our architecture reflects us, as truly as a mirror.
—LOUIS SULLIVAN
Looking west from the kitchen the weather is transformed. Storm light unrolls like a magic carpet, softens the lowering clouds,
the snow, less ominous, windless, dropping straight down on the alley, garages and rooftops geometrically outlined,
smokestacks, water towers, cottonwoods and maples, uniform back porches hammered from two-by-fours and unfinished lumber,
the backyard a pillowed expanse extruding elbows and rockers of the overturned aluminum patio chairs,
a charnel yard emerging from monsoon mud or a battlefield reclaimed by creeping sand dunes.
Thirteen days without sun, terminal overcast stalled above the city like a shield to protect us from what we most desire.