A. Robert Lee - Americas - Selected Verse and Vignette

across silver forests

across black roped lava

across 500-species of shrub and plant

across volcano pools

ascend

rock formations

serrated cliff-faces

weather and wind chiseled ledges

whorls, folds, wrinkles

high cathedral vaults of Nature

playfields of pottered cinder

stilled spurts of fire-stream

messaged pebble, boulder, stone

live thesaurus petrification

vocabularies of Spain fade –

San Cristóbal, Santa Cruz, Baltran, Isabela

and other Encantadas

vocabularies of England fade –

buccaneer Ambrose Cowley

Darwin Research Station

Lonesome George

vocabularies of Melville and Vonnegut fade

page and paragraph

vocabularies of cruise and tour fade

guide and guidebook

is not this, first, finally, un-faded

earth’s evolutionary design

earth’s sea-risen island

epic

of

magma, basalt, crust, littoral?

is not this, first, finally, un-faded

earth’s delivery room?

American Visa

Are you now, have you ever been, a nudist?

Hardly the question I had in mind

at 1965 Grosvenor Square London

visa-seeking for The New Republic.

Self-fantasy had me the trouble-maker,

the commie, the un-American,

youth politico CIA/FBI target.

Why, surely, those

debutant Tribune reviews in the shadow of

Orwell and Foot?

Why, surely, those slivers of student Left-ism,

a war-march or two,

a smidgeon of Marx or Trotsky?

But a nudist?

For all my dubious Ban the Bomb shouts

or half-believed Clause 4 English politics

or America the Bad clatter

or Vietnam as chancre attitude

or VOTE LABOUR, Holy Loch, and End The War placards

or just as equally

my secret sharer

attraction to

the America of

Kennedy Camelot hope

Ginsberg and Dylan lyric

Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane

Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch

Manhattan and San Francisco

King Civil Rights and Malcolm Black Power

LBJ and Voter bills,

did it all just come down to

nakedness?

OK, you’re all set

in all-American

signature phrase

said the wholly pleasant

case officer.

Set to go, stamped passport visa, enjoy your stay.

Scholar resident

like a hundred arriving others.

Euston Square to Times Square

for sure.

This new Londoner’s theatre-curtain of importance

duly lowered,

on and into high Atlantic

treading the

Queen Elizabeth

Southampton

to New York time

and Fulbright America.

Was my best banner

simply to have kept my clothes on,

kept my pink-Brit flesh wrapped?

Had I saved America

or myself,

or the both of us

from exposure?

New York Magic Mountain

Sailing into New York Harbor

past verdigris-statued Liberty

was I not latest Columbus,

if lower deck passenger

then still

the Drake or Raleigh?

Hardly, had my stomach been first to say.

Anxious to match the Atlantic

my reading was

Mann’s Mountain

but where Castorp and Joachim fevered towards death

I had just turned merely pale,

billow queasy.

Land balance

lay in Manhattan’s

grid of everywhere peopled

squares and blocks and heights

the human multi-Broadway

of uptown downtown

Bowery to Yonkers

Village to Central Park

Big Apple city health

Yes Philadelphia

Yes to the Lenape

Yes to Penn and Franklin

Yes to Independence’s cracked bell

Yes to Rittenhouse Square

Yes to Chesnutt Street’s ivied Penn

Yes to Market Street

Yes to the Inquirer

Yes to the Schuylkill, river and expressway

Yes to 30 thStreet Train Station

Yes to the Art Museum – Duchamp and Rocky

Yes to the Main Line, Welsh Bryn Mawr, Italian Paoli

Yes to Marian Anderson’s contralto

Yes to the pages of David Bradley and Lorene Cary

Yes to W. Wilson Goode’s mayorship

Yes to each middle-Philadelphia Row House

Yes

also

to

the

Germantown

food

sign

I

saw

in 1972

Anglo-Saxon Pizzas (since 1957)

Chicago L

Hog winter Chicago

South Halsted freeze-up

Wind-chill

Lake Michigan

February

Broken L train

high on CTA track-curve

yet

sub-zero’d

into

break-down

Skyline driver-carriage

frozen

into

four-square mirror

ice-block

city

transport

cube

and

cubist

tableau

How not to summon Sandburg winter stockyards?

How not to re-see black Projects, boxed human damp and chill?

How not to re-walk cold Irish, Polish, Bohemian sidewalks?

How not to board at speed Green and Red Lines –

King Drive, Ashland/East 63rd, Halsted, 90 thDan Ryan?

How not to earn spring thaw Chicago?

How not to ride un-iced Chicago, train and carriage?

How not to warm with hot-humid summer Chicago?

How not to un-hog Chicago, South and North Halsted?

How not to outdoor-people Chicago, all Chicago,

the busy tickets of human heat from cold of the L city?

Charlottesville Juleps

Mr. Jefferson’s Virginia

Monticello and University

Serpentine Walls

Pavilion grandeur

Palladio in the Blue Ridge.

The genius of the Declaration

and, well,

Sally Hemings.

Ah those First Families of Virginia

those Lees of Virginia

Frances Lightfoot Lee

Lighthorse Harry Lee

and always Robert E. Lee

The Confederacy’s own

The Glorious Cause

The Lost Cause.

What, then, from an Atlantic away

to almost inherit that name?

What to confess a mother

who knew Robert E.

only as a racehorse name

and so passed my way

quite another kind of

cavalier heritage?

What, then, a twenty years later

the visiting one year post at UVa?

Are you, could you be,

connected to the Virginia Lees?

came that southern-genteel

phone voice.

Would you, could you, speak

of England, The Queen, to

The Daughters of The American Confederacy?

No DAR, No Sir,

No Yankee-Doodle

rather The Queen of the South

on the line, Richmond HQ’d,

Old Dominion.

Juleps it was, mint juleps

whole trays of them

for St. Andrew crossed

ladies and the guest.

And from Madame Chairman

(none of your ms or chairlady)

a toast to England

to Majesty

to Albion’s seed

to its undetected

viande chevaline .

So…it began.

My family, I temporized,

has long sought reconciliation

has long wanted to offer the hand of forgiveness.

Was it not my ailing father,

tears welling, who demanded that if one day

his son should tread Virginia soil

then let amends be made?

For ours were indeed the Lees

who bequeathed the General I lied.

For ours indeed were the Lees

who slave-farmed tobacco and crop.

For ours were indeed the Lees

who opted for rum and empire in the Indies.

For ours were the Lees

who oversaw cane and sugar,

and ours were, indeed, the Lees, came my pause,

who droit de seigneur

knotted, spliced,

with Africa’s Barbados and Jamaica women.

The result, mes chères mesdames ,

was, is, er,

a crossblood of Lees

and right here

since Raleigh’s landing,