O to be an American, and title your book of poems
American Poems – or, better yet, American Elegies –
in the warm, broad-shouldered knowledge that your readers
will frown and nod. For you are, after all, setting out
to tell us how modern America is, or how singularly awful,
and either way therefore important. The ambition! A tone
miraculously both ironic and sincere! O
to write American Pastoral. What could be less parochial,
more thrilling an oxymoron? Try it with anything.
American Cutlery. Just imagine!
––But pity the flinching bathos
of Canadian Sonnets. Their unread author, warming local fingers
in fingerless gloves by a grate on which burn the remainders
of four dozen screenplays. (Canadian Psycho, Canadian Beauty,
The Canadian, O Canada: A Canadian Crime Story,
Canadian Woman, Canadian Rust, Once Upon a Time in
etc.) And in a final gesture,
leaning, with threadbare elbows up
on the mantel to prove, like Branwell Brontë,
one can die standing on principle, with thoughts to the last like iron
filings, drawn inexorably to magnetic south, to the 45th
and 47th, the 49th and all those uneven parallels.