UP
Blow it up, Professor Lowe.
Blow it full, let it puff up,
over the rim,
higher than all walls, all churches, all hills
Sulfuric acid and iron could
make buoyancy
as joyful as Mary Poppins’ ceiling tea party
as goofy as Charlie, pre-burp, bobbing up, up,
full of carbonation, pre-fan that will chop you up,
Let’s take a look at this field:
Bull Run, where the Union will run from the horns
of The South
This was back when no one was schooled,
but everyone knew something.
Lowe knew, as Lincoln did, that it can be learned.
A president come from a hillbilly hick,
A flying man from an earthbound home.
Will you go up, Mr. Lincoln?
Will you go up?
In Anaheim he stands and sits day in and out
Will you let your jangly body, your heavy mind, be heightened?
I am already of height, Lincoln says, in body, mind, and country
Snorts
Professor Thaddeus Lowe
offering to go
not to the unknown, like the moon men,
but to known danger, the most primitive: falling.
UP
Lowe is taken in.
Not by a cloud, but by
a tent, then a locked room: SPY!
This man, says hotelier, is a man of science
Thus he goes up ballooning
And what is this war?
(It was an infant, and as yet had not been christened)
Lowe is sent back.
I, Lowe said soon, am Chief Aeronaut.
We have flags! he’d said.
And with this one (holds up)
And this one flapping (this one)
The balloon was as round as a basketball
(Not the stretched-out socks of today)
We are balloons
Not armoured
Truly souls are balloons
Delicate, full, powerful, working silently
We can rise
Can you see the people run
can you see borders
aren’t drawn on the land?
No chalk has been thwapped against the forest
“Acknowledging indebtedness to your encouragement for the opportunity,” Lowe telegraphed, from the balloon herself, o’er the rickety White House
(Mary Todd was shopping for it, don’t worry)
AND
Fort Corcoran, arising,
flags at hand,
I wave, wave, replace, wave
And your fire finds its end exactly.
A thousand yards of Indian silk, Lowe orders
A hundred yards of cotton cord, he orders
How at ground level we contact eye to eye,
and loathe the scent of each other,
Get me up, get me up!
Tie the sails together on this air ship!
The Constitution breathes life into the Intrepid
And Lowe is up to where Gains’ Mill is only two words
Where one can see the men, and the hat colors as labels
Kill this one not that
But no one will tell us what to do
But Trump will tell us what to do
Well we won’t listen to no one
But we will bow to Robert E. Lee
Well we ain’t never gonna give up
Until we do
The Confederacy sends up dress silk, over Seven Days
A sandbar emerges and snags it
The river flows on around
The Union folds up the dresses,
Gets out the sharp scissors and makes hankies for Congress
Congress won’t tell us what to do
We know who won
We know we know
We fight nakeder and nakeder
A WAY
The Confederates spring more leaks.
Out leak people who have been things
And things fall away from people entirely,
Going fallow
It is impossible, yet they must lose
It is where they must be, for me to sit today
Here at 39 degrees and 94 degrees, with nary a national boundary in range.
Going On 