The 19th, the Century
For John Huizinga

Century of sage mountebanks.
Wordsworth who wandered lonely as a cloud
Whitman who lounged on the grass
Sweet John Clare who sang of
love’s frenzied stifled throes.

Melville whose Brit publisher forgot
to include the epilogue to Moby Dick
visiting trouble and scorn on our Herman
and thus unwittingly setting up
an eventual revival that would
do our troubled author naught
but good after he was long dead.
And yet, his enduring spirit would be delighted
to have left vague seafaring memories of white whales
& abandoned hopes some treasure beyond measure.

Not to disregard the politicians.
Bonaparte who at least got a good retreat named for him
Lincoln who saved the Union
(to his credit) and still is patron saint
Of the Republicans (to what would be his
Grave deformed genetic dismay)

Tom Jefferson whose vision
Would not let him rest
between bouts of intestinal disease
And good relations with Sally Hemmings

Longfellow and the shores of Gitchegumee
Bowie & his knives
Davy Crockett & the wild frontier (of which he was king)
Twain and his pilgrimages to the Old West
GA Custer & schemes of American conquest
Sitting Bull & his appropriate answer to the Yankee Peril

Go to the Little Big Horn O questing pilgrim
& see with your own eyes
The innocent ridge on that high prairie plain
Where the last Sioux masses camped
Somewhere only the imperial blind might not see them

Meanwhile, in Africa . . . Burton
and his hashish habit and the memoirs
his wife burned in their Victorian fireplace.

Verlaine & Rimbaud, who stopped writing
and became an arms dealer in Africa.

And while we’re in Africa . . .
Dr. Livingston & Mr. Stanley
and shouldn’t white Europeans
be proud of their legacy?
Victoria Falls. What better name
for a spectacle that was there then
but won’t be much longer?

It was a time of great dreams.
All come elegantly true in disastrous ways.

There were never any Neanderthal in Africa
They were the first white people.
Whatever of their genetic trace lingers
in our blood, you have to think, will soon
be just as extinct as they are.