Reed Whittemore   THE DESTRUCTION OF WASHINGTON When Washington has been destroyed, And the pollutants have been silting up for an age, Then the old town will attract the world's Schliemanns. What, they will say, a dig! as they uncover The L'Enfant plan in the saxifrage. So many plaques, so many figures in marble With large shoulders and lawman lips Will have to be pieced together and moved to the new Smithsonian That the mere logistics will delight vips. For how can one pass by a muchness? There will be fund drives With uplifting glosses, Teams of researchers will mass with massive machinery At the Rayburn ruin To outscoop Athens and Knossos. Dusty Scholars will stumble in, looking nearsightedly At gray facades Of pillar and portal, And at curious acres of asphalt, For clues to the mystery of that culture's gods. Money of course they will miss, Since money is spoke not at all on the plaques there, Nor will they shovel up evidence That the occupants of the chambers and cloakrooms Were strangers in town, protecting their deities elsewhere, But sanctums they surely will guess at, Where the real and true pieties were once expressed. If the Greeks had their Elusinians, Surely this tribe on the Potomac had mysteries too? --Having to do, perhaps, with the "Wild West"? Like most of us sitting here now beside the Potomac, They will find the Potomac primitives hard to assess. Oh, may their ignorance be, than ours, At least less!   THE STORING OF THE SOUL The American soul has been stored under the stairs In a box with the mittens and scarves For the longest time. We couldn't think where we had put it. We looked in the attic and cellar, and in the garage, And then found it at last, as I say, under the stairs. Why would anyone store a poor spiritual soul there, We wondered. It was ever so slightly creased and decreased bit it was Perfectly safe, we were sure. We put it back in the box there. I have been checking it Fridays, just to make sure It isn't departing, And see no change in it at all, except in its color, Which is less. Of its continuing immortality I have made sure By adding more mothballs. But do you think that there is a chance that we will have .......need of it? I ask because if we will I think I should air it. A soul is not at its best when it is Heavy with mothballs.   David Carlson 'When's Hide Seek What, 35" x 28" mixed media on wood, 2002 See more work by David Carlson PSALM The Lord feeds some of His prisoners better than others. It could be said of Him that He is not a just god but an indifferent god. That He is not to be trusted to reward the righteous and punish the unscrupulous. That He maketh the poor poorer but is otherwise undependable. It could be said of Him that it is His school of the germane that produced the ......Congressional Record. That it is His vision of justice that gave us cost accounting. It could be said of Him that thought we walk with Him all the days of our lives we ......will never fathom Him Because He is empty. These are dark images of our Lord That make it seem needful for us to pray not unto Him But ourselves. But when we do that we find that indeed we are truly lost And we rush back into the safer fold, impressed by His care for us.   THINKING OF TENTS I am thinking of tents and tentage, tents through the ages. I had half a tent in the army and rolled it religiously, But Supply stole it back at war's end, leaving me tentless. And tentless I thankfully still am, a house man at heart, Thinking of tents as one who has passed quite beyond tents, Passed the stakes and the flaps, mosquitoes and mildew, And come to the ultimate tent, archetypal, platonic, With one cot in it, and one man curled on the cot Drinking, cooling small angers, smelling death in the distance-- War's end-- World's end-- Sullen Achilles.   BIG BROTHER I spent last night with my Big (Board) (American) Brother and all his Perception Managers as they told me (right on the tube) what I should eat buy drink wear and invest in toward the end of the evening they noticed that I was unconscious and took this to mean that the lobes of my infantile brain were grieving for lack of sufficient data on all the amazing breakthroughs in life and tummy remedies improving each human human at each waking moment so then they fixed up my lobes until my perceptions grew glum and started to bug me at which time I woke and smiled to them saying dear Sirs I wish you to know Sirs that when Sirs you sit Sirs and smile Sirs and say Sirs NOTHING AT ALL it is then that my lobes Sirs advise me that all my major organic systems Sirs (by which to be brief I mean Sirs my lymphatic system .....................................................my circulatory system .....................................................my respiratory system .....................................................my digestive system .....................................................and my reproductive system) love you as all such small-brother systems (Sirs) SHOULD and yet Sirs I wish you also to know at this time Sirs that when Sirs you talk to me from the depths of your own noisy lobes Sirs and keep telling me telling me telling me that which you tell me it is THEN Sirs that something unbrotherly sweeps through my systems with the muggy messy manic moronic consequence that I itch and twitch and cannot seem to stop twitching Sirs but must sweat shudder and come to DESPISE Sirs YOU Sirs at at that time I yearn yearn and even yearn MORE Sirs for you to SHUT ..............................UP ok?   AN AMERICAN TAKES A WALK In the middle of this life's journey He came, like Dante, on a wood The notes said stood for error But in his case stood for good, Where his art and prowess left him And let him become a child To whom the wild seemed milder Than his old neighborhood. Had he, with those abandoned Sons of fatal decrees, Then been found by a shepherd And bred up to shepherdese, Or retrieved, like Dante, by Virgil And led through circles and seas To some brighter country beyond His annotated trees, He could not have been more cared for. Nature was awfully kind. Hell in that motherly habit Put hell quite out of mind. How in that Arden could human Frailty be but glossed? How in that Eden could Adam Really be lost?   Reed Whittemore is the author of thirteen books of poetry, including The Self-Made Man, The Mother's Breast & The Father's House, and The Past, The Future, The Present: Poems Selected and New. Among other honors, he has served as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, and as the Poet Laureate of Maryland. He was the literary editor of the New Republic, and in a distinguished teaching career, taught at Carleton College and The University of Maryland. He is now retired and lives in College Park. Published in Volume 5, Number 1, Winter 2004.