It occurs to me that, if we have to go
into exile, I can’t.
I’m too brittle – psychologically at least.
I visualize a grandpa on a mattress
on a cart, drawn by a horse
or a big family, Stukas overhead.
He’s staring into the Fabergé egg
of denial and senility, which gives
no comfort, only an image
of comfort at a distance.
Which is silly, of course – we’d drive,
until the gas ran out.
We talk about New Zealand,
if McCain wins. But they’ve
been globalized since we were there
and I doubt they’re still so attractively
quiet and self-effacing.
Or some gated community in Honduras. In photos,
the dust around carports
is a strange reddish-gray.
We’d learn Spanish finally, and be nice
enough to the maid to hope
she saw us as nice.
I find myself googling Moose Jaw,
Saskatchewan. Really exotic
places are those you have no image of.
It has tunnels where Chinese hid,
later used by bootleggers, and murals
of idealized molls and bootleggers.
And the Klan’s traditionally strong.
– I’d sit on a porch, hiding a gun
(one bullet? two? a full clip?),
waiting for the Mounties.
No fancy uniform, just cops,
resenting their FBI liaison
but resenting us more ...
Feeling vulnerable and old,
I wonder if McCain, or Cheney,
undergoes a nostalgia combining that
of the aristocrat
for places, with everyone in his place,
and the classic bourgeois need
for endless expansion of the self in space.
Then I go to our back yard
to weed. The soil here is terrible
(DC was a swamp, after all)
and lawns are bad unless you have real money.
