America, December 31st, 2021

[Editorial Note: I wanted to risk trying something unusual for this blog. This poem was written as my submission for Lomez's excellent Passage Prize, which I ordered, and you should too. It made the short list for the finals (yay!), but not the final prizes (boo!), nor the second round selections for the print edition (double boo!). So you might describe this as being among the worst of the worst of the best, which sounds about right to me.

The following was my introduction to the submission, which I'm not sure if I should get straight to the point and delete, but while I am a confident essayist, I am a nervous poet, so forgive the endless self-effacement:

"Hey Curtis,

Let me begin with an apology of sorts - it has been twenty years since I last wrote a poem, and I never really understood free verse. I kind of think of poetry as divided into either a) regular forms with rhyme and meter, or b) unusually personal imagery-heavy essays broken up to look visually appealing and emphasize certain pauses. I don't know if the latter is your view of free verse, however. To write the following in regular poetic form is probably outside my skill level, would take a very long time and probably would end up worse. Hence the result below. When you describe the meter of your poems, it mostly doesn't register with me, as I just breeze past this and read the sentences, which I really like. All of which is to say – I’m not sure whether this should be a poem at all, or an essay. But it doesn't seem to fit the prompt for the literary non-fiction version. So I figured I'd submit it anyway, if for no other reason than that I very much enjoyed the writing prompt to write something personal that risked being cringe." ]


America, December 31st, 2021

America, that land

That drew me in so long ago,

Is caught, pincer-like,

Between the two great forces

Of decaying empires.

The Scylla,

Of the great deal of ruin in a nation,

And the Charybdis,

That that which cannot continue, will cease.

 

I remember, when I first arrived,

Having occasion to observe,

With some regularity,

That this was a great country.

At billboards advertising

"Twenty Chicken McNuggets for $6.99".

Partly in jest, but mostly serious,

I used to remark:

"These should have the national anthem

Blaring on repeat,

Flag flying in the breeze.

This country believes in value!".

At redneck engineering videos,

Of homemade trebuchets.

At old universities,

Taking classes for free,

With famous and brilliant professors.

At the wonder that every band I loved,

Would just turn up in my town,

And play live every year or so.

At college girls that would find

My accent just cute enough,

For that 5-10% boost,

To come back to my apartment.

 

America, you have been very good to me.

 

I had one such moment recently,

At seeing the winning entries,

In a giant pumpkin contest,

At a small-town country fair.

A two-thousand-pound pumpkin!

Grown simply for the je ne sais quois!

There is still greatness,

Wonder and weirdness,

In odd corners you can stumble on.

But the next thought I had

Was realizing

Just how many years it was

Since last I had that thought.

Partly, the desensitization

Of repeated exposure.

Partly, the ingrate foreigner,

Now successful and dismissive,

Of those that helped him.

But partly, I think,

The decline that is all around us.

 

I used to joke that America

Seemed to be experiencing

The Soviet time-line in reverse,

Except it was crumbling, not strengthening.

Then some mental reflex noted

The multiplying number of epicycles,

And I wondered how sure I was,

That things didn't better match,

To the Roman empire,

Or the Roman republic,

Or the French revolution,

Or the Byzantines,

Or to many others

Of which I knew less.

(The amateur historian,

Confident in his theory,

Would do well to count

How many Chinese dynasties

He can name at all,

Then exclude those where

The mental association maps

Only to a diad,

With a name, and a phrase

Like "vase" or "pottery army".)

The confusing pattern-matching,

Where every peg is a meteorite,

Fractally weird and irregular,

And endlessly able to be rotated,

And every hole is an impact crater,

Blasted into the earth,

Chaos where a neat outline should be.

Beware the advice

Of the reactionary

Who only knows one history

Of decline and fall.

 

Decline, in one form or another,

Is on the lips of almost

Everyone these days.

A Democrat-voting work friend

Asks me if I plan

To home-school my children,

With "Yes" his obvious answer.

I responded that,

I had thought about this, and

Concluded that if there

Is not a nearby school,

Either public or private,

That I would trust to

Educate my child,

Is this actually still

The country I should be living in?

 

The answer, unspoken, lingers in the air.

 

The obvious follow-on question,

Also unspoken, is:

"If not here, then where?"

This one has no easy answer,

As everywhere turns into America.

 

But we have sailed

Very close to Charybdis,

And fail to tack towards

Scylla at our peril.

Is it really about to collapse?

Or is this just

The Twitter talking?

The outrage-bait machine,

Using my brain as

A meat puppet?

The glowing square is

Hypnotic and smooth,

And out of it pours

Misery and anxiety.

The view out my window

Is the same as ever.

 

The conditional is easy to tell.

Fussell understood it well,

Describing the prospect of death

For a soldier in wartime.

If the porridge hits the propeller:

"It is going to happen to me,

And only my not being here

Will prevent it."

This realization,

Fussell thought,

Was what drove them mad.

 

As a foreigner, I can tell you,

Woodrow Wilson was right

About us hyphenated-Americans

(For the first generation at least).

The man who would leave

His wife for a mistress,

Will abandon her, too, in turn,

When the deal's gone sour.

When it is your country,

You will fight.

When you are a stranger,

You will leave.

That is, if you can

Figure it out in time.

 

One day, just like

Niall Ferguson's bond investors,

On the eve of WW1,

You may wake up and find out

That the great deal

Of ruin in a nation

Has finally been exhausted.

 

It is not going to happen, probably,

This week, month, or year, though.

The mean decline is still slow.

The variance is alarming.

 

The young man who once left

His home, carelessly,

Not even really sure

Quite what the plan was,

Finds this an overwhelming question

Now in middle age.

 

So what to do in the meantime?

If now is not, in fact, the right time?

 

Relative to the Soviets,

Our mangled and mismatched metaphor,

We have one great advantage.

We also have an NKVD,

But no one is in charge of it.

Its ad hoc structure gives

Only loose coordination,

And since the only payoff comes

In the debased coin of status,

Our own era's commissars

Simply cannot wait

To announce themselves publicly.

"In this house we believe..."

Solzhenitsyn would have dreamed

Of foes this blatant.

 

I suspect that as things get

Inexorably worse,

The skill that soon,

Will matter most

Is knowing whom to trust,

And whom you can

Speak freely to.

 

I have found just two

Rules of thumb worth relaying.

If you have a

Sense of humor,

And if you can

Debate a point

And not take it personally,

I can likely talk about

Almost anything with you,

If I choose my words correctly.

At least today.

Maybe one day,

The backwards-winding clock

Will strike 1937,

And then everyone will be,

Guilty of something.

 

Wish as we might,

We cannot live

In any era but our own.

One must always try

To avoid the uselessness

And self-pity in

"The whining, the pleas of a coward".

 

So, what can you do with all this?

 

Propaganda succeeds, in part,

When those who disagree with it,

Are afraid to say so.

 

Dissenting openly and publicly,

Especially in the written word,

Is courting great trouble.

It is for the bold,

If you have a heart and spirit,

As firm as Solzhenitsyn,

An old testament prophet,

In this post testament world.

 

But speaking up in private,

To those you can trust,

Builds camaraderie and friendship,

The basis of all bonds that form

Incipient organizations,

Upon which revival may depend.

 

Perhaps this adds

Small brick on brick,

To the start of something new,

The Empire that grows,

From the ashes of the Republic.

 

Perhaps it serves only,

As the intellectual companionship,

Of knowing one is not alone,

In these dispirited times.

That the Soviet mental asylum,

We dissidents are placed in,

Is actually filled with the sane.

 

I may not live boldly

In many things,

But I believe in backing one's judgment

In estimations of character.

Learn how to read people,

Judiciously and carefully,

To figure out whom you can trust.

 

But to let them know

That they can trust you,

To break the higher order uncertainty,

Someone generally has to have

The courage to say something

Out of sync with modernity.

 

Might you get it wrong?

Of course you might get it wrong!

I have got it badly wrong

Exactly three times, so far.

None were fatal, thankfully.

Did you really think that there

Was some option, in this morass,

That didn't come with risk?

 

Reader, you would go

A fair way towards

Being conditionally trusted,

Knowing not much more

Than that you stumbled across this poem.