Shanghaied Paisano

“And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea…”

What ships what shores what grey islands!
What songs the sirens sang
What name Achilles bore
What harboring Orestes found

“So suddenly out of the stale and drowsy lair, the lair of slaves,
Like lightning Europe lep’t forth…..half startled at itself
Its feet upon the ashes and the rags…..Its hands tight
to the throat of kings…”

So that—-
we set up mast and sail
on that swart ship once more
and so set forth once more
forth upon the gobbly sea
loaded with liberated vestal virgins
and discus throwers reading Walden—-

And when he was being born in a dream
he approached the flying earth
and spied a huge banner stretched ‘round it
like a cloud
And the sign proclaimed
ABANDON ALL DESPAIR YE WHO ENTER HERE

Passagio al Occidente
a new kind of Passover
And the Genovese sea flooding westward
The high prow parting the spray
una migrazione degli uccelli
following the fantail
crying out a contrappunto
With a crew of desperados
and Johan Padan, shanghaied paisano—-
Full fathom five he falls
(those are pearls that were his balls)

Only connect! Cried Columbus
Staring through his telescope
And he scoped it out all right
the “new world” as he saw it
And he saw it plain
made of gold bullion and bloody Marys
And the natives “like children”
brought him treasures they had hoarded
for the next Coming
of Blondie
(described in their fumetti
their magic comic strips)
And Johan Padan
topside sailor
Genovese giovane
illiterate marinaro
crossed himself and
dropped his pantaloons
when he gazed upon pure flesh of Indy
for the first time
his old time religion
never having prepared him for
naked animal anima
with no sense of sin
quando il verbo si fa carne
As nude virgins and shamans
fell before the blunderbuss
cavalli crashing up the beaches
of Carib paradisos
the gold gleaming heavy
in the blood-red sands

And the great navigator
hugging the absolute shoreline
the great navigator with his lead line
sounding the depths
mapped the continental shelf
ran in at high tide
breaching the shallows
spyglass trained inland
Another body for the human mind
Animus e anima
to be charted probed and bloodlet for gold

“Old men carrying their fathers and philosophers
weeping in the dust, America perhaps, Don Quixote”

And Cortez came
the fair-haired god as prophesied
and was welcome as such by the Aztecas
and so laid waste to them
(although there were later uprisings
at once brave and pathetic—
Tierra y Libertad!
cried an army of Indians
marching out of jungles—
followed still much later by
Viva Zapata!
against the invading powers of Nafta
and the New World Order)

Whereas and wherefor
North of the Border too
Our God the greatest White Father
told the white men under his command
to take all the Indian’s land
because that was their manifest destiny
And they did then set forth
with the great obscene hunger of
the territorial imperative—
set forth upon the virgin continent
unmapped uncharted and unsung

And the Mayflower had landed
not in an empty wilderness—
in a land already occupied
with a culture of signs and signals
omens and prophecies—
its pulse later taken by missionary sawbones
bent on converting the heathen
to parlor games, crochet, and high tea

(Boston’s Tea Party
the first “people’s protest”
against big bad corporations)

While other Whiteys landed up the Hudson
as in a painting of the Hudson River School
wading ashore (also already occupied)
in Dutch boots
to sink in among croaking frogs

History repeats itself with a stutter
Potemkin sailors revolt
Kerensky shoots his bolt
Kropotkin cries
And an anarchist colony is founded at Woodstock

Americus
carrying the contents of civilization
in his hat
Chaplin’s beat-up bowler
And the world his melon
balanced on his head

So that—he a man of no fortune
with naught to lose
and much to gain—
A wop and a yid in one
A kind of Don Quixote
tilting at sawmills and ginmills
A Euro man indeed
(Blackie and Whitey and all shades in between)
on the virginous land
as American as Booker T. Washington
or brother Du Bois (who had no use for him)
or Emma Goldman or Mother Jones
or Walt Whitman or Mark Twain
“the Lincoln of our lit”
Each a palimpset of everybody’s past
A man like a country
Restless…driven…
And the forest birds shaken with music

In the gloaming
by a waterfall
a woman shakes out her gold hair
Across the pond
his heart turns over
Lovely stranger, life is fleeting—
If we could know each other!
Darkness falls