I don't read this poem a lot.
And then I feel like someone in one of the class visits today
sort of like put me on a dare to do it.
So if I start bombing the set around this portion of it,
that's why.
Place way too much pressure on myself.
It's called "Correction."
"Correction.
The question of whether the idea of America is dead
is not a question.
A question by its definition does not
cease to exist in the language you hear
spoken by those who ask it.
This is why the dead, if we say where the living belong
or the dead, this is why the dead are not a question.
Now think of a fire.
Think of it eating its way across a battlefield.
And it's breathing the air for which the dead no longer exist.
Now think of it searching the field for a good place to die.
The question of whether the fire is dead
is not a question because the question of whether the fire is
alive still exists in the language you hear
spoken by those who ask it.
This is why, in America, the idea
of a fire is you eat more air than the dead can expire
or else the Earth you can't stomach devours you too.
In America, the idea of a fire is
what you consume is where you belong,
which is why where the Earth belongs is the dead
and why the only good place to die is where the idea of a fire
does not cease to exist in the language you hear spoken
by those who ask it.
Now my brother waits for me on the other side of the river,
watching the old war factory burn to the ground.
He once called across to ask if I worry.
Is a man catching fire without warning, he said, all
you really think we inherit from our father?
And I told him to ask me once again in our language.
Before this year is done, he said,
do I wake up at the end of town?
Is my body thrown through the windshield of my car?
That's when the country will long
to say I'm finished, when all that's ours is all a man
leaves us and all we continue is his reign over dirt.
And that's when my brother will cross the river
like a fire eating its way across the battlefield.
How I wonder, he'll say, if a family is waiting for me
a few years down the road."