OH America
The sun sets in
you.
Are you the
grave of our day?
Shall I come to you, the open tomb of my race?
I would come, if I felt my hour had
struck.
I would
rather you came to me.
For that matter
Mahomet never went to any
mountain
Save it had
first approached him and cajoled his soul.
You have cajoled the souls of
millions of us
America,
Why won’t
you cajole my soul?
I wish you would.
I confess I am afraid of you.
The catastrophe of your exaggerate
love,
You who never
find yourself in love
But only lose yourself further,
decomposing.
You who never recover from out of
the orgasm of loving
Your pristine, isolate integrity, lost aeons ago.
Your singleness within the
universe.
You who in loving break
down
And break
further and further down
Your bounds of isolation,
But who never rise,
resurrected, from this grave of mingling,
In a new proud singleness,
America.
Your more-than-European
idealism,
Like a
be-aureoled bleached skeleton hovering
Its cage-ribs in the social heaven,
beneficent.
And then your single
resurrection
Into
machine-uprisen perfect man.
Even the winged skeleton of your
bleached ideal
Is
not so frightening as that clean smooth
Automaton of your uprisen
self,
Machine
American.
Do you wonder that I am afraid to
come
And answer the
first machine-cut question from the lips of
your iron men?
Put
the first cents into metallic fingers of your officers
And sit beside the
steel-straight arms of your fair women
American?
This may be a withering tree, this
Europe,
But here,
even a customs-official is still
vulnerable.
I am so terrified,
America,
Of the iron
click of your human contact.
And after this
The winding-sheet of your self-less ideal
love.
Boundless
love
Like a poison
gas.
Does no one realise that love should
be intense, individual,
Not boundless.
This boundless love is like the bad
smell
Of something
gone wrong in the middle.
All this philanthropy and benevolence on other
people’s
behalf
Just a bad smell.
Yet, America,
Your elvishness.
Your New England
uncanniness,
Your
western brutal faery quality.
My soul is half-cajoled, half-cajoled.
Something in you which carries me
beyond
Yankee,
Yankee,
What we call
human.
Carries me
where I want to be carried . . .
Or don’t I?
What does it matter
What we call human, and what we
don’t call human?
The rose would smell as sweet.
And to be limited by a mere word is to be less
than a
hopping flea, which hops over such
an obstruction at
first
jump.
Your horrible, skeleton, aureoled
ideal.
Your weird
bright motor-productive mechanism,
Two spectres.
But moreover
A dark, unfathomed will, that
is not un-Jewish;
A set, stoic endurance, non-European;
An ultimate desperateness,
un-African;
A deliberate generosity,
non-Oriental.
The strange, unaccustomed geste of
your demonish
New World nature
Glimpsed now and
then.
Nobody knows you.
You don’t know
yourself.
And I, who
am half in love with you,
What am I in love with?
My own
imaginings?
Say it is not so.
Say, through the
branches
America,
America
Of all your
machines,
Say, in
the deep sockets of your idealistic skull,
Dark, aboriginal
eyes
Stoic, able to
wait through ages
Glancing.
Say, in the sound of all your
machines
And white
words, white-wash American,
Deep pulsing of a strange heart
New throb, like a stirring
under the false dawn that
precedes the
real.
Nascent American
Demonish, lurking among the
undergrowth
Of
many-stemmed machines and chimneys that smoke
like pine-trees.
Dark, elvish,
Modern, unissued, uncanny
America,
Your
nascent demon people
Lurking among the deeps of your industrial thicket
Allure me till I am beside
myself,
A
nympholepht.
“These States!” as Whitman
said,
Whatever he
meant.
Baden-Baden.