Classic Poem

What right have we got to take it so hard
That the fairest landscape in all our real estate
Should concentrate the overheated eye
On the cooling towers of a power plant,
So shaped and poised and spaced as to suggest
Four lovely adolescent antelopes
At ease at sunset?

(When they come, twenty thousand years from now,
To excavate and annotate our relics,
The archeologists will have to grant,
" Whatever these jerks were up to, they had Style. " )

Or that our manifold American languages
Should utter nothing but what tongues have been
Uttering all along? Just Jesus Christ ,
Jesus Christ , all day, all night, nothing
But Jesus Christ .
(So many sacred names.)

Greyhound and Trailways remain
What they have been, and so do
Schlitz and Bud, Scarsdale and Carbondale,
Exxon and Texaco, Harper's and Atlantic,
Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Post and Kellogg —
Glass and ugly glass and glass again.

Christlike, the ranks of filing cabinets
March like an army, neat in olive drab.
And I do
Not care. What am
I: a slab of Spam,
To take your stomach's piecemeal pulse
Every time somebody decent dies?
James Wright died. All right.

Let the Dow fall lower than a broker's soul
And sink into the nauseating sea
With Fort Bragg and the Ivy League. Who cares?
Let left wing and right wing
Beat each other to death in a Hazel of feathers,
Let the crooks go on screwing the crooks
Until all quarter-billion of them (us)
Turn into a butter substitute
In the shape of a continental doughnut, all yellow.

Whatever archaic torsos of Apollo
May say, they do not editorialize
Or radiate commandments about your life.
What civilization founded on mechanical cleverness,
Retail merchandising, and a queer knack
For irresponsible abstraction
Can expect Bachs and Shakespeares every week?
Which makes those miracles we do manage to get —
Flourishing orchards of outlandish eloquence —
All the more miraculous. But who cares?
All right: you care. I know you do.
And I care, too.
But less than he did,
James Wright,
With all that heroic room
In his great corny American heart — room
For horses young and old, degenerates,
Teen-age athletes, blasphemies, Warren G. Harding,
Of all choliambic people;
Those calamitous factories making the Ohio River
A stinking Styx
With lurid lights and chemical effluents
More strange, galaxies, light-years more bizarre
Than the extremest Spanish surrealist
Likening his own firing squad to a episode of doves
Whose music constitutes a permanent Cancer,
As certain stars are said to do.

And every cornflake hatched in Battle Creek
Makes me ashamed of every word.