You were the first Dutchman I ever knew
and now I live among your kind, your
fishers and swallowers, ripping up
what they’ve built, running water where
they drained it forty years before,
legal and illegal-
izing their drugs, and letting
the masses in, though not really.
When I was ten I’d have told you,
there treading water in our mud hole,
that I knew a better way –
USA! USA! –
which won the big one
when the chips were down
(mostly) –
but even then, clothed and correct,
I’d have had to concede,
amid blown-out lives
(neighborhoods, brains, gutters…)
that maybe the promised promise
wasn’t always delivered.
So where does that leave us
(Are you dead?)
now I’m in your country
and you’re in mine?
How bout we split the difference?
You grant me my mountain-prairie-
can-do horizon,
and I you your genius architecture
and painter sky.
Each can keep the people he’s with.
(They’re about the same.)
You’ll not find me, though,
swimming in no hole.
And those cuckoo clocks you keep for yourself.
