A man looks at his country and sees
through his breath the simple British line
and the beginning of a desert, and
what he himself will be when he is
miles from the city of goats, another
foreign line in the sky, falling so it
seems from America to the oddly
Jewish past. Who will tell his Danish
mother that her nordic son's abandonment
began with a Livingston at Columbia
and will end with his blood in Jerusalem?
Now the veiled jungle has become a kingdom
of half-truths and bitter Semites.
The cousin who entered from the North
crashed into bullets on his daily spin,
a murdered motorcar, a dying Swede.

At last, the extraction awakens in him
the calls of a dozen birds he imitated
upon the shores of midwestern lakes, and he
strides into the sand to summon cranes,
and dream of the fish he's lost to wars
in Montana. How the boys can bear him,
he never knows; to walk into the cockpit
and switch the engines on, he finds,
is more than simple gesture, and the demon
in the sky screams, in black bursts,
the banished name of his darling. At night,
together, they ascend, and without fire,
and without words, he cuts the controls
and glides to the east, over the graves
of his prophets, and he drinks until no memory
is left to rub from the propellers when
he returns to the dirt. And there was never
such a hero as that upon the earth.