Jan Henson Dow
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After Reading Velikovsky
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“The bones of hippopotami are found
as far north as Yorkshire?”
Did they set sail, floating northward
from crocodile infested rivers
in the warm South?
Their compass somehow circling, circling
for true North.
All about them ice flows thicken
in the cold air.
Why would any living thing leave that warm tide
to find a lost pole?
Puzzles like these interest me
though the pieces do not fit.
I have traced the archipelago of myself
across the tusks of Siberian mammoth,
a terrifying scrimshaw of breast
and belly, gums, teeth and bone
flash frozen in ancient amber.
Could I trace myself, tracing myself
back through the icy glass of time
To find the hand that holds the charcoal
thus
along a single line?
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Oh America! Oh Benjamin!
Found poem from D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)
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Oh America! Oh Benjamin!
Doctor Franklin,
snuff-colored little man.
The hour has struck!
The free mob will lynch me,
and that’s my freedom.
What did the Pilgrim Fathers come for, then,
when they came so gruesomely over the black sea?
The Perfectibility of Man!
Ah heaven, what a dreary theme!
The perfectibility of the Ford Car!
I am many men.
Which of them are you going to perfect?
There are other men in me
besides this patient ass
who sits here in a tweed jacket.
Oh, but I have a strange and fugitive self
shut out and howling like a wolf.
See his red eyes in the dark?
The soul of man is a dark forest,
The Hercynian Wood that scared the Romans so,
Here am I now in tatters and scratched to ribbons.
Even the husbandman strains in dark mastery
over the unwilling earth and beast.
The Aztec is gone, and the Incas.
The Red Indian, the Esquimo, the Patagonian
are negligible numbers.
Ou’ sont les neiges d’antan?
My dear, wherever they are,
they will come down again next winter,
sure as houses.
The Red Man is dead and unappeased.
Do not imagine him happy in his
Happy Hunting Ground.
Think of it.
Eve!
And birds of paradise.
And apples.
There are ghosts in the air.
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