Classic Poem

I

the lethargic vs violence as alternatives of each other for los americanos
& U S Grant (at Shiloh, as ex.) had the gall to stay
inside a lethargy until it let him down into either
vice (Galena, or, as president) or
a virtue of such a movement as, example,
Vicksburg

say that he struck, going down, either
morass or
rock — and when it was rock, he was

— this wld seem to be the power in the principle —

able to comprehend the movement of mass of men, the
transposition of the
Mississippi (Or
continents, example,
somebody else than:
grant

better, that is, that a man stay lethargic than
blow somebody's face off — off,
the face of, blow
the earth

II

that (like the man sd) Booth
killing Lincoln is the melodrama right with
the drama: Mister Christ and
Broadway

Or going out to Bull Run looking for
Waterloo. the
diorama. And having to get the fastidious hell home
that afternoon
as fast as the carriage horses
can't make it (Lee Highway
littered with broken
elegances

Reverse of
sic transit gloria, the
Latin American whom the cab driver told me
he picked up at Union Station had
one word of english — link-
cone. And drove him
straight to the monument, the man
went up the stairs and fell down on his knees
where he could see the statue and stayed there
in the attitude of prayer

III

whoop,
went the bird
in the tree the day
the fellow
fell down
in the thicket

whoop, was the bird's
lay as the fellow lay

and I picked up a minie ball
(the way
it can be
again
of an afternoon,

or with the French girl Brandy Station
was
thick grass
and the gray house and back of it

yes mam the movement
of horses, as
— I repeat —
the bird.

IV

West Point it wasn't. Nor New England. Nor
those cavalry
flauntlets

As the Mexican War was
filibusterers
in the West,
and cadets
before Chapultepec: the elevator

goink down
from waterloo,
the Civil War

was the basement. Only nobody
except butternut
and his fellow on the other side
wanted to believe it, they all wanted

what Jay Gould got

(and Joe Blow got swap
in the side of the head

V

Now you take this Forrest, Nathan Bedford Forrest. He stalks the Western theater of operations as something the English, to this day, think Lee wouldn't have surpassed had anybody dared to give this Memphis slave-trader the width of men and field to command which he only had as first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. And didn't use, Forrest could already avoid the temptation of the Filibusterer, he had applied first principles in the War.

What I'd wanted to say was,
that he's a man so locked in the act of himself

(right up to after Davis had been taken
and no last movie scene to the way he was still
cutting tracks behind U.S. Army units, a very

exact and busy man.

I also have to voice this impression of him to give, if it
does, the sense of how he was:

he's like a man his tongue was cut out,
before even Shiloh showed him
an extraordinary executive
of men horses and goods

VI

Two things still aren't brought in to give context to the War: (I), that
you don't get Grant except as you find what he was that Geo Washington
also comes alive at only if you realize he was to real estate —

and I mean land
when land was as oil steel and what, now?

Managing men, wasn't it, when men suddenly what was Grant's

because of the industrial revolution

were what the guys who died then were

For the first time,
like that, the sprawled fellow Devil's Glen, natural resource.

The older half of it — (2) — that each one of them,

Butternut,

and Yankee Doodle,

weren't as different as North and South, farmer and factory etc.

They were — for the first time — enough of them.

Plus railroad tracks

to be moved around as
utility

The leaders, Grant Sherman Forrest not
Jeb Stuart
and themselves

the birth of

the recent And Lincoln

likewise (after Christ

Link-cone

VII

You take it
from there

VIII

What he said was, in that instance
I got there first
with the most men

Grant didn't hurry.
He just had the most.

More of the latter died.