English

" The word covert , " smiles the Admiral,
" has no statutory meaning. " The
committee is silent, non-plussed.
Though none seems disposed to do so,
all are left to extrapolate:
" Therefore a covert operation
cannot be defined; it lacks
all semantic friction. Therefore
certain concurrent allegations
involving narcotics, mining
of harbors, murders, mutilation,
subversion, contumacy, contempt
of World Court and the congress,
relate to a non-thing and thereby
are logically and legally

" That whereas we are not one people
but a miscegenation of peoples holding
in common Only the Law Therefore
be it urged on the several States
that all school children, prior
to graduation and requisite thereto
have the United States Constitution's
Preamble by rote and in English."

That I've aged into a face
pig-lidded, chop-fallen, a scare-
mask and memento mori ... That
the U.S isn't looking good either:
hypocrite, paranoid, bully,
assassin of the so-called
free world, caught murdering
and lying one week and crying
" Credibility " the next ... (Because
the U.S must Grow , understand,
having borrowed the sun and the moon;
while in fact, like myself, it is shrinking,
near the last of the capital: one
continental land-mass plus
the odd archipelago taken

That two hundred and one years ago
our Fathers brought forth in Philadelphia,
between the collapse of the Past
and the void of the Future,
a new al-chemic of government
addressed to these questions: How
shall the best be preserved
and the worst survived? ... that they found
the Historian's stone and applied it,
coming up with a science of man, A Manual
of Practical Comity ...

That we see in it pride of race
and pride of conviction and pride
of power — a continent
for the taking; a war won —

That all these antinomies,
and others, resolve at the touch
of the term " Power " ( Power:
the capacity to preserve
or better one's lot, whether
by force or by art ...)

That both sexes, in all times
under all systems, pursue it —
a few without scruple, the rest
for protection against the few ...

That the rhetoric and passion
for freedom, justice, decency
propagate among the oppressed,
be the oppression real or imagined ...

That fifty presidential and one-

1

That after two hundred years
what remains of the Age of Reason
is the Syllogism of Sleaze:
" I am an honorable man.
Therefore what I do to prosper
is honorable. If the law
forbids it, the law's wrong ..."

2

That honor comes to be measured
in degrees of impunity ...

That the word reason denotes:
an operation of the mind (as in law
or science) in accordance
with etiological norms
derived from the " Natural World; "
which, curiously, has produced
homo sapiens and his reason, which
now holds hostage that same
natural world and reason itself
and hence all science, all law
all history and human time
past present and future ...

That Reason can wreck a world
but not make one, the question
remaining: can it save one? ... We look
for a law to transcend law. We take

Above all, what is it?
It is not literature,
though it has its rhetoric. ... Say
a legal document. But
(or therefore) a moral one:
... to form a more perfect Union ...
secure the Blessings of Liberty ...
(all those inalienables of person and property
declared for at Independence). A kind
of juridical I Ching , then:
a book that is not a book
but a living being, or
in this case a hall full, a convention;
and to be consulted (if not
conjured with: six pages,
a hexagram of a sort!) Ah, Fathers,

I knew
a nymph once — nymph
in the mayfly sense at least
of a phase, an aqueous phase,
preceding adulthood. . . . Nymphs
of the ephemeridae ,
indeed, she half lived among,
apter to swim than walk,
as though brookwater, headlong
heedless and mercurial,
were in truth her element. . . .Nymph,
then. Or nymph enough, short
of the immortal...She was twenty-odd. . . .

In another May-month it was,
if lilac and rock-bell and jonquil
and warblers teetering

Ashore and car-borne again, headed
roughly west-southwest from Wareham
and Cape Cod, considering the Humpback and Finback
on their alien and vaporous planet —
how the differently-colored water
at its head makes a baleen whale
seem a continent unto itself,
or an atoll, with submerged reef,
shallows, tidemark, skyline
steady above the waves ... One can imagine
being on an island, hardly being an island.
Which of course is the death of him.
He can't hide. Not a whole geography.

Nor can we. Though we bulk less,