To be aghast 
at our ghosts
without admitting that
they remain among us
is to be willfully
American.

To be comfortable
in this haunted home,
oblivious to what 
some feel
in its most sunlit rooms, 
is to be carelessly
American.

To laugh off every
chill as merely historic
or imaginary,
to turn away from
the ancestral familiarity
of those faces of 
menace past and present,
is to be blindly
American.

Not to see
any of the ghosts,
not to see them
in every corridor, closet, 
basement, school,
prison, or mirror,
is to be resolutely
American, is practically

to define
“American”, is the
quintessential practice

of being
American.

There’s so little inside me
you’d think I was a balloon
if I didn’t weigh this much.

I’m not a balloon. What, then?
Maybe a hollow iron sphere.
Steel encapsulation.

Knock on me and I make
a pleasing sound. I’m a bell,
a closed bell, dark inside.

Knock on me and see
if you can understand what I say.
I’ve spoken an empty tongue since birth.

Now I’m old and resigned to it, but
there was a time when I tried
to crack myself open and become a full throat. 

It never worked. Here I am, then,
a hard ball of air. When things are hot,
it’s hot air; when things are cold, you can guess.

Things are hot right now and I’m boiling.
Not likely to crack but if you swing me, I’ll bust heads.
If it gets cold, I can break them just as well.

Understand one thing, though: I’m not one of you,
will never be.  I’m the big hard void and will be,
before and after your war. You need a bell like me.

I do tend to ring your way. It’s an accident, really;
a mistake in your favor. Think of me as eraser,
here to shift the ledger; to wreck it

and in the process of wrecking it
to crack myself open at last,
make my one rightful noise, then shatter.

I have no illusions. You won’t want me
then. Will have no need of my voice
once the breaking’s done. In a time of war

you seize the nearest weapon. I’m ready.
I’m your rock, your branch, your 
morningstar. Let’s swing. Let’s sing.

There’s a shooting —
maybe at a school or 
a night club —

or an injustice — rights
being taken from someone
or a swift deportation and
separation from family —

or a scandal — a sex thing
or maybe it’s espionage
or a mix of both —

and while shaking your head
and exclaiming your now-routine
amazement and shock 
at such goings on

you are shocked and amazed
all over again when your head
falls right off
and rolls across the ground
for what seems like an eon
before it comes to rest
against a Civil War replica cannon
being used in a reenactment 

and without warning your head
gets rammed down the barrel 
and in a blast of sulfur and flame
you are flying toward the other side

your loose and empty head
having become someone else’s ammo
for this drawn out massacre called
The American Experience
and you realize

if you had just had your head
tied a little more tightly 
to something solid
like an understanding of history
to hold it down
instead of being so floaty
with reaction and awe at
the everyday more of the same

you might have avoided this

you might have at least been 
the one firing the cannon

you might at best have been
the one who stopped it from firing

This country once,
to some or perhaps most,
looked solid and white from above,

much like a blank paper, perhaps like
the back of a page in a history
text book or the back of a facsimile
of a foundational document,

or most of all, like a sea of deadly cold
covered by an ice pack.

When the Captains of Industry
and Control finally decided 
it had gone on long enough and
brought in an Icebreaker,
when they finally chose to lose the illusion
and let everyone in on the open secret,
when they decided they simply
didn’t care anymore about hiding the truth,
started breaking the ice wide enough apart
to make their greed work less difficult
and thus made it so folks could see
deep cold ocean beneath,
killer ocean that had always been there,

it staggered those
who’d been fighting drowning all their lives
while stuffed below the ice forever and a day

to see how the broken floes
who’d thought they were solid and safe
gave up their volition and sense
to get behind the Icebreaker itself
as it portrayed itself as
a savior of the great white pack,
who thought they’d make it when the ship
got through and showed
how thin the ice had always been,

how the solidity had been fragile from the start
and the fact that it hid the cruel sea under it
was the only reason it had been allowed
to last as long as it had.