HEROIC FIGURE, FROM “HEIMAT”

But where’s the New Jerusalem I remember,

alternatives once sought and then rejected

for another term of college in September?

And where’s the hope, now vaguely recollected,

for something to emerge from history,

a savior, just so long as it wasn’t me?

Where’s the activist who would create

a city that I don’t quite recognize,

but sense beneath the scaffold of the state,

a forward path half-hidden from our eyes.

The game seemed almost even. Here’s the catch:

We can only, now, observe the match.

Yet when I close my eyes and conjure up

a vision of the past, it’s not a demo

with banners and workers rising to the top,

but bar-room conversations and a memo

marked “for internal circulation only.”

A blueprint for the coming age? Get real!

A meeting about a meeting to discuss

last week’s news and what it might reveal

about the coming days for the rest of us.

So many Internationals have broken

on the particulars of nation-state

-act locally. The “global” is a token

of what we wish we were. The hour is late

for revolutions, so let’s mosey back

to earlier times, a shrapnel-riddled amble

through the trenches of our history

-it leads to here, but still, for now let’s ramble

through 1848 in Germany.

There was a revolution, and a hero,

the Prussian Army’s second-fastest shot,

Leutnant Willich, who stared up at the sun

and noticed it was far away, and hot.

The revolution seethed among the Poles

in Posen; the German students were at arms,

the officers were split, half at attention

while the others shrugged at the alarms.

And they, the lot of them, would soon descend

on Heidelberg, to frame a constitution

for a new and better Germany,

and Willich lined up to make his contribution.

You should have seen him then-his resignation

from the army new, his slim physique

a sentinel for that society

he might have sworn would come within the week.

And they offered the King of Prussia Germany,

and the King of Prussia,

full of piss and World Spirit,

told the Germans to go fuck themselves.

The Junkers stayed in their toy castles,

and when the conferences dispersed

our hero escaped

to the dingy cafés of a London exile.

Exile always stinks, and London’s wet.

Willich fell in with a gabbing koffee klatch,

“The Communist League”-which surely had the spark,

but lacked the wherewithal to make it catch.

Marx would not shut up, and Engels blathered,

but Willich was, at heart, a “man of action,”

a “Don Juan,” Marx had quipped, and soon enough,

our hero was demanding satisfaction.

But Dr. Marx wouldn’t put up a fight,

and instead adopted Fabian tactics,

refusing to meet in the field of battle,

but rather took verbal pot-shots

in a war of attrition.

And you have to know when you’re beaten,

when you’re going uphill on open ground,

when your opponent’s just too entrenched…

so no damn duel in the end.

And London’s always wet, and often dull,

and Willich’s eyes soon swiveled to the west.

America! A hick democracy

without the lords and kings and all the rest.

The waxing republic shone despite itself,

a beacon still-at least if one could will it

to be so-and things stayed as they were,

and no one-yet-had quite the nerve to kill it.

Thoreau was scribbling notes beside a pond

while Emerson was waxing transcendental

back in Boston. Such things were swept aside

by something darker-something fundamental.

Garrison knew that “freedom” was a lie

while men were held in bondage. Fitzhugh scoffed

at talk of “democracy,” and praised the planters.

(I’m just observing; please suppress your cough.)

But even the darkly scowling John Calhoun

with his tripe about “concurrent majorities,”

his redneck threats of “nullification,”

and his game of Russian roulette with the Union

couldn’t quite bring himself to kill the Republic.

But the bastards almost killed it

when that fop Beauregard

shelled the Stars and Stripes

in the middle of Charleston Harbor

and the boys in blue marched south,

and half a million slaves went north,

and August Willich was in uniform,

and he shot up through the ranks,

till Colonel Willich harangued the Ohio Germans in his regiment

about the virtues of communism,

and it was all the same fight-

Germany ‘48. America ‘61…

And the troops loved him.

Who wouldn’t?

You have to be a little crazy

to lead men into battle, not think about it,

but to march in a tight Napoleonic formation

with the minié balls whizzing by

and nothing between the bullet and your skull

but a battered blue kepi.

And he took that bullet at the Battle of Resaca.

He’d always chased the subtle, brilliant trails

of dialectics (or the northern star?)

that led him to a bed behind the front

and left him with a nasty, livid scar.

A brevetted major general,

a bit player in the Glory, Glory Hallelujah

of the Second American Revolution

against the big house and overseer,

he read of Bismarck’s cobbled-together Empire

under a different Kaiser,

and he offered his services in the fight

to stick it to the would-be Bonaparte

because there is no progress without struggle,

and there’s no struggle like kicking ass,

and the new Kaiser,

full of piss and World Spirit,

told him to go fuck himself.

And that was the revolution-

sidelined in a fight by a Kraut emperor

against a would-be Frog emperor.

And Paris went into revolt,

and the barricades went up,

and the communards sang “L’Internationale,”

and the Kaiser let them starve,

and “democracy was restored,”

and that mama’s boy Karl Marx learned his lessons

in his crummy Soho flat,

but Lieutenant Willich would die

in a distant, half-savage homeland.

And that was that, with some success

poisoned by recurrent dreams-

Utopia (with an address),

high hopes with factitious schemes

that couldn’t break the nation-state

but broke upon it.

Now we’re stuck

trying to somehow formulate

a way out. But there’s no such luck.

Germany was cold, and Wilhelm reigned

with the prayers of the EKD

to serenade his rule. The Reichstag seethed,

though barely. So much for democracy.

______________

And Whitman sang his “Chants Democratic”

to a Tammany ballot and bones in the attic,

to Thurlow Weed and squalor on Hester,

to gauze on the wounds that continue to fester.

You study the period into the night

to pass an exam, but it’s all over-right?

By now we’ve moved past that old tenement story

to get to a homeland of plenty and glory.

It was “Morning in America,”

and my childhood spread out

in a collage of Norman Rockwell adaptations

thrust into political commercials.

But the streets were still tidy,

garbage cans lined up at the curb

and bicycles snug in garages

awaiting the morning papers,

and the houses were still chilly,

with lemonade made from concentrate

in jugs in refrigerators

while AC units hummed in harmony,

and the flag still flew

from the concrete front porches,

the bases bolted

into wooden support beams

for newly shingled roofs.

It all seems so distant,

like a different century

or a different country

in spite of the street signs

and pleas to recycle.

A generation went to shit

on specious talk-the marketplace,

“the global village,” and the bit

where each remaining empty space

was plotted for a housing tract,

a shopping mall, a Burger King,

and when the moment came to act,

we didn’t do a goddamn thing

but went to work for longer hours,

at lower wages. We foreswore

our vague, inchoate doubts.

The powers

that were, will be-forevermore.

The sun goes down, a rusty red,

into a fading, toxic West.

Shall we go home? Oh, no! Instead,

we’ll stay at work like all the rest,

though the dusk proclaims the lie

of the jingoistic high

that surges through our weary brains

in sound-bite snarls and smug refrains

that rise above the keyboards’ constant clack,

reminders of the things we won’t get back.

Quincy R. Lehr’s poetry and criticism have appeared in numerous journals and e-zines in the U.S., UK, Ireland, Australia, and the Czech Republic. His first book, Across the Grid of Streets, appeared in 2008, and his second, Obscure Classics of English Progressive Rock, will appear in 2011. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he teaches history and casts his third-party left-wing protest votes. A previous poem, Thou Art Weighed in the Balances… was published on ILR last December.