At a statue of Hamilton
Knowing more than they knew, knowing everything, really, or more than we want to know, we dismiss them now, in their waistcoats, their hose, their grandiloquence. If we see them at all in our minds it's a kind of stage-play — a costume- and period-piece. They strike Attitudes, Gaze-Afar- Into-The-Future.. .
They don't see us there.
Wouldn't know us if they did. . . Still, who could help striking attitudes when every right-foot-advanced broke the New Millennium?
And who would not Gaze-Afar when all the History there was he had written that morning: A-little- corruption-is-a-necessary-engine- of-government. . . Oh, say, Mr Hamilton, can't you see - Afar, of course — through the bronze and the birds' dung — a Trail of Tears, a Slaughter in the Wilderness, a Gilded Age an Empire a poisoning of the earth an Apocalypse? — You, aloft there with the one foot advanced, the Gaze infinite, leading the way.
Peter Kane Dufault
Previous page
