Surrender
The customer refreshment zone
of this sweeping dealership
nestled along the Interstate
like a tumor of the human spirit
is the worst place imaginable to mine
a cinderblock-thick history
of the Roman Empire’s slow decline,
worse than the belly of an active volcano,
worse than a guillotine’s
neckworn crook.
Not for any fault of the author’s,
a laureled pillar knighted
for lighting bonfires in the mind,
but because of a chalkboard-sized television
bolted to the wall
and the talk show host therein
going bananas in a language
of arm flaps and rabbit shrieks,
flitting from one inanity to another
like an unhinged cockatiel
some troubled child has set on fire,
so that any comprehension
of small pox riddled legionaries
perishing under gothic clubs
in the black forests
of the western hinterlands
must now make room for Hollywood’s
premier pet hypnotherapist
strutting around in a loud scarf
and big white sunglasses,
giving his picks for the season’s
trendiest canine sweaters,
and the fraying of Britannia
involve a celebrity physician
cooking heart-healthy margherita pizza
in an oven built from the ruins
of Hadrian’s Wall.
There is nothing to do
but jam an emergency cigarette
in my stuttering lips
and hasten outside to the field next door
with the weight of the world
dragging down my shoulders,
or if not the world,
then at least the Oxford English Dictionary
complete and unabridged,
slung across my back
like a medieval kite shield
as though the old historian,
last defender of the life of the mind,
and I, his rubber-kneed squire,
had walked out this morning
to reject the host’s terms
of unconditional surrender
much to the delight of her minions
smeared bodily with margherita pizza sauce
and girdled in a patchwork armor
of chic dog sweaters—her hordes
who shall cut us to crow feed
before the sun has run out
on these soft native grasses,
the big bluestem, the sprangletop
the blowing buffalo.
