414
KARL SHAPIRO
Do something about the sour smell of schools. Call the Americans!
Herewith I abolish up and down. Future and past for those
with
radial vision.
Everything everywhere has been decided in everyone's favor.
I end on the dead level and peter out. Is it time for the curtain?
Shall we applaud at the end of the second movement?
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I love Nowhere where the factories die of malnutrition.
I love Nowhere where there are no roads, no rivers, no interesting
Indians,
Where history is invented in the History Department and there are
no centennials of anything,
Where every tree is planted by hand and has a private tutor,
Where the "parts" have to be ordered and the sky settles all questions,
Where travelers from California bitch at the backwardness and New
Yorkers step on the gas in a panic,
Where the gras:; in winter is gray not brown,
Where the population diminishes.
Here on the boundary of the hired West, equidistant from every
tourist office, and the air is washed by distance, here at last
there is nothing to recommend.
May no one ever attempt a recommendation; Chicago be as far as
Karachi.
Though the warriors come with rockets, may they fall off the trucks.
May the voting be light and the clouds like a cruise and the criminal
boredom enter the district of hogs.
I love Nowhere where the human brag is a brag of neither time
nor place,
But an elephant house of smithsonian bones and the white cathedrals
of grain,
The feeding-lots in the snow with the steers huddled in symmetrical
misery, backs to the sleet,
To beef us up in the Beef State plains, something to look at.
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To the poor (aux pauvres) crime alone (Ie crime seul) opens (ouvre)
les portes de la vie (the doors of life). Entire libraries of music
