Christopher Phelps
Palimpsestuous
1
America. A yearmarked tale on the loose, about yea high. A blank-faced slate with a masonry, makeshift memory. A fresh craving for turned page. A tote bag with a gun in it—who’s gonna argue with that? A shudder and shutter the thought. A self-saboutique! Making it up as it goes along. In faith and credit. In the fullness of forgetting. In the scratch of a lottery ticket.
2
“Can a walk in the woods repair a broken heart?”
It depends: Did the pieces splinter or break clean?
“That’s not the right framing. A heart is a living muscle.”
Ah, then that wasn’t the organ broken.
“You’re right, but that’s where I felt myself, not in the upper ganglia.”
Tell me about the brokenness, I should have said.
3
We watched all twelve hours of the Ken Burns documentary, The American Revolution. I knew we were a hot mess—the only thing you can’t unknow, can’t unsee, can’t unbe, being from this tear in the fabric—but dear God, how hot will it get before we pay our karmic debt?
Capital-g, capital-c Capitalism with its roots in the Cellar, God! Burning forty towns and the crops of the Haudenosaunee, Sullivan’s so-ordered scorched-Earth. Reactionary reactions serving themselves hot preemption and searing retaliation. The plans of the Congress and the Army (“Continental!”, “Continental”!), playing into their own hands. The insider-trading of cover stories, some of which somehow self-fulfill themselves in the ears of the people, give or take a couple hundred years.
Liberty! Equality! And (Baron von Steuben’s) Goddamn! These shoutable nouns, pulled from the redoubts. Marched and piled and peeled from themselves. Fleeing and returning to themselves, at random, the acts of might and mercy almost interchangeable. And in the settled, unsettling dust, reclaiming enslaved people’s lives—some who fought for—on the side of—“earned” their freedom, among so many others who could not, not having dropped into the chamber at the precise moment of expulsion. In the eye of an instant: the explosive discharge. The abrupt dismissal.
4
How much could Washington wash away in the pan of his ideals? How many promissory notes of pay and dignity? (Out come the glasses from the coat.)
How many pangs of righteousness could a single Paine provide? (Out come the follow-up encouragements.)
And if mercy is the master of enmity, in the end, how much credit could we give ourselves, murdering the neighbors?
Right. This is a land of magnesium flares: ideals so bright they could blind you, or just as easily burn.
5
It’s too dry for the illegal kind of fireworks here in Santa Fe, this year. That won’t stop some brash and daring patriots, as the surrounding mountains smolder.
I hear that impulse in myself. The spark is now! In the long run, we’re all hypothetical. A compromise between roman candles in hand and wringing hands with the abstainers: light the fuse and run.
Our forge in the valley of death. Our green dreams and hot tempers-ature. Our constitutional immaturity and immanent self-evidence. Our lunging headlong hearts.
Double standards undercount the number of standards: three or four at a time, through most of the founding chaos, and more as the years got carried away.
The defeated British at Yorktown, ordered not to look in the direction of the victors. Those wannabes in the empire game were in the end beneath them. Or: defeat’s like that, a pain in the eye. Or: they couldn’t look weak in front of the French, who’d just helped siege them to oblivion. Or: let’s look askance as we walk away from what we’ve all been doing here. Or (getting ahead of things falling into place): let them quake in their new quandary; they won’t last half a lifetime on their own.
6
And for all that improbable braid of property and blood, pulled from the ground and the head, there it was, a kernel inside the thieving, reconceiving, freethinking nightmare—a truthful, ruthless ember—glowing in the heart of a ruined hearth.
“After immersing in the Ken Burns documentary, The American Revolution, I wrote ‘Palimpsestuous’ around July 4th of this year. It’s rare that I write ekphrastically, but here the documentary fell right into the frame. Because I usually write at home, it’s also rare that I associate poems with other places, but I wrote the first section of this poem in a hotel in Ouray, Colorado. Its exasperated salvo echoed through the rallying, unraveling cries to follow.” —Christopher Phelps
Christopher Phelps is a queer autistic poet who lives for radical honesty and etymological rootwork. The author of Cosmosis and Word Problems, he has poems in journals including Alocasia, Beloit Poetry Journal, Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, and Poetry. He works and rests in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Find him at christopher-phelps.com and christopherphelps.substack.com
