National Anthem, and: Homecoming
National Anthem
If, then, a country could be saved, may weall be its pulse & schematics. May our flagskneel for us. May nothing reign. May one daymean Tuesday, & may our planes on alertover Khost & Riyadh whisper love songsto the canyons beneath them. May weddingsgo on for months. May guns gather bulletsback into themselves like fishing line. Ifa country could be saved, could wave lagoonstoo be a part of it? Could slot machines?Could a country be lifted like a god?If Modesto comes back, could Saturday nightwe drive T-Birds to the Wolfman? Maydawn's early light lacquer our faces. MayHuck & Jim—May group text—Let everycoal seam spit back its dead. Let the manyof us be one, the one be numerous& mongrel. Imagine spangled—& mayeach of our stadiums smolder. May marchingbands dazzle & thrall us, their drums like warno one will remark, their winds & brassesforming the tightest of scripts. The seamstress,we know—age 13—who dyed the cotton& cut the starlight in the flag Francis Scotthailed was a servant girl, Grace Wisher. Maywe, in the poem of our country, be suchexquisite stitchwork. May synecdochemean "fruited plain." "Beautiful river." Inthat country, nuke silos swallow missilesdown like hot dogs. In that country, cop carsflip Snapples to day laborers. May starsblaze. May landfills flower & hum. May oneby one we gather, then, in the swollen fieldsof our republic, above us the rockets' [End Page 15]
red glare growing faint, some praise-songswept upon us utterly, like a wind. May wewe will say—which will, one day, become us. [End Page 16]
Homecoming
Gettysburg Area High School
Here though a faiththe nation could be salvaged with— pick & roll drills at pregame, layup lines. Here skyhookshanging like ornaments. In Americaour monarchs sit courtside, queen shining in her cheap tiara, texting, the men of the king's cortege letting Milk Duds arc cleanly to each other's mouths. Howcoolly they reign, as if at last, after history, this were in fact our home. Hereghost tours & pup tents. Cycloramas. Here bronze artillerists studding the tended lanes of our battlefields.
For irony—after the amputations, afterthe lice & gut rot, the war came home, at Appomattox,to a living room. Here Lee slack in a caned loveseat. With company in the anteroom, Edmund Ruffin, wrappedin Confederate flags, fitting a rifle to his mouth for forever. Isn't there [End Page 17] always, afterward, a touch of domesticity? A marriage feast, Luke calls heaven, a homeof many dwelling places. Perfumes. Sun decks. Of redemption, though, I know no finer formthan the wheel route the Warriors' star freshman runs from the free-throw line, the forward cutting, guard passing to a spot the stretch fourhas not yet arrived at. Here emancipated slave families lifting the roof beams of the future. Couldn't youbelieve that history were a husk merely? Here, in the small country of the gym, jump shots rain like mercy. Men press their bodies together, the pep band's saxes glittering, our queen with her retinue bending,now, to accept their sashes. Afterward there will be dancing. Bounce houses. Here, the chips & bunting. The ballmade of plastic scattering one light in a thousand directions at once. [End Page 18]
Christopher Kempf is the author of the poetry collections Late in the Empire of Men and, most recently, What Though the Field Be Lost, forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, he is currently a doctoral candidate in English Literature at the University of Chicago.
