False Nightmare

"I give the yawp barbaric

Of piety and pelf

(Who now reads Herrick?)

"And contradict myself

No matter, the verse is large.

My five-and-ten cent shelf

"The continent is: my targe

Bigger than Greece. The shock

Of Me exceeds its marge

"Myself the old cock

With wind and water wild

(Hell with the privy lock):

"I have no woman child;

Onan-Amurikee

My son, alone, beguiled

"By my complacency

In priggery to slay

My blind posterity . . ."

-These words, at dawn of day

In the sleep-awakened mind,

I made Walt Whitman say:

Wherefore I and my kind

Wear meekly in the face

A pale honeydew rind

Of rotten-sweet grace;

Ungracefully doating

Great-aunts hanged in lace

We are: mildly gloating

Dog bones in a trunk

Saved in the attic. . . .

                      Floating

Hating king and monk,

The classes and the mass,

We chartered an old junk

(Like Jesus on his ass)

Unto the smutty corn

And smirking sassafras.

In bulled Europa's morn

We love our land because

All night we raped her-torn,

Blue grass and glade. Jackdaws,

Buzzards and crows the land

Love with prurient claws;

So may I cunning my hand

To clip the increment

From the land or quicksand;

For unto us God sent

To gloze with iron bonds

The dozing continent-

The fallow graves, ponds

Full of limp fish, tall

Terrains, fields and fronds

Through which we crawl, and call.