This poem was actually inspired by a poem by Robinson Jeffers.
Since I've moved back to the West Coast,
after three years of exile in Boston,
I've become more and more enamored of
not just California but California's literary history.
And Robinson Jeffers is someone whose poetry I admire
more and more as I get older.
He has a poem called "Shine, Perishing Republic," which
is a very dark assessment of the United States
at that time in history.
And you can imagine what it was like to read that poem
and think about the idea of republic
in the context of the George W. Bush regime.
This is called "Republic."
Soon industry and agriculture converged,
and the combustion engine sowed the dirt
clod truck farms green with onion tops and chicory.
Mowed the hay, fed the swine and mutton
through belts and shoots, cleared the blue oak
and the chaparral, chipped the wood for mulch,
back-filled the marshes, replacing buck bean
with dent corn, removed the unsavory foliage of quag,
made the land into a production, made it produce,
pistoned and oiled and forged against its own nature.
And with enterprise, built silos, stockyards, warehouses,
processing plants, abattoirs, walk-in refrigerators,
canneries, mills, and centers of distribution.
It meant something, in spite of machinery,
to say "the country," to say "apple season."
Though what it meant was a kind of nose-thumbing
and a kind of sweetness as when one says "how quaint"
knowing that a refined listener understands the double-ness.
And the leveling of the land in doing it
in sameness cured malaria as the standing water in low glades
disappeared, as the musk eggs drained.
Typhoid and yellow fever decreased.
Even milk sickness abated thanks to the rise of the feeding pin.
Cattle no longer grazing on white snake root.
Vanquished the germs that bedeviled the rural areas.
The rural areas also vanquished, made
monochromatic and mechanized, made suburban.
Now, the illnesses we contract are chronic illnesses--
dyspepsia, arthritis, heart disease, kidney disease,
high blood pressure, asthma, chronic pain, allergies,
anxiety, emphysema, diabetes, cirrhosis, Lyme disease, AIDS,
chronic fatigue syndrome, malnutrition, morbid obesity,
hypertension, cancers of the various kinds--
bladder, bone, eye, lymph, mouth, ovary, thyroid, liver,
colon, bile duct, lung, breast, throat,
and sundry areas of the brain.
No better at accounting for death and no worse.
We still die.
We carry our uninhabited mortal frames back to the land,
cover them in sod.
We take the land to the brink of our dying.
It stands watch dutifully, artfully,
enriched with sewer sludge and urea
to green against eternity of green.
Hocus pocus.
Here is a pig in a farrowing crate, eating its own feces.
Human in its ability to litter inside a cage,
to nest, to grow gravid, and to throw its young.
I know I should be mindful of dangerous analogy.
The pig is only the pig, and we aren't
merely the wide open field flattened
to a space resembling nothing.
You want me to tell you the marvels of invention,
that we persevere, that the time of flourishing is at hand.
I should like to think it.
Meanwhile, where have I put the notebook
on which I was scribbling?
It began like the smell of droppings
and that narrow country road.