Make It New
One century after Frederick Jackson Turner
Dismantled our frontier, a balding man
Across the aisle on a coast-to-coast flight
Pulled some papers from his calfskin briefcase,
Scanned them in the laser of his seatlight,
Ripped them in half, then in quarters, and stuffed
Them into a plastic bag. When I returned
To my magazine, he promptly fetched some more,
Held them to the beam and calmly tore,
Dismissing the cart of drinks. Over the Catskills,
Lake Erie, the Mississippi, steadily
Westering, he shed a fine thin scrawl
That documented, I decided, life
Up to here, arid jobs and botched relations,
Marriages and most of all the kids
Who dropped him first and whom he now dismembered
And crammed into the plastic oubliette
He would let fall forever into the first
Receptacle on deplaning. Setting back
His watch and striding toward ground transportation
With a lightened carry-on, he would assume
More challenging positions, unentangling
Alliances and roads not previously
Taken, meanwhile pledging to resist
Atlantic urges to turn present joys
Into the tonnage of the written past
Except, perhaps, to let some foster self
Dash off, quixotically, the truly new
On onionskin in calligraphic haiku
To slip between the dense and still inflating
Volumes of our other coastal shelf.
(first published in The Hudson Review)
