History This Morning

Another Dugan poem I found in high school, when I was an insufferable prick who picked everything apart to look for God and the devil hiding in the line breaks. I won't even go into the embarrassing comments I've scribbled in the margins of the beat-up books I've kept from that period.


And I still love the phrase "lacking the Arab frenzy of the zero" even now that I can see how unintentionally racist and patronizing it is.

This Morning Here

Alan Dugan

This is this morning: all
the evils and glories of last night
are gone except for their
effects: the great world wars
I and II, the great marriage
of Edward the VII or VIII
to Wallis Warfield Simpson and
the rockets numbered like the Popes
have incandesced in flight
or broken on the moon: now
the new day with its famous
beauties to be seized at once
has started and the clerks
have swept the sidewalks
to the curb, the glass doors
are open, and the first
customers walk up and down
the supermarket alleys of their eyes
to Muzak. Every item has
been cut out of its nature,
wrapped disguised as something 
else, and sold clean by fractions.
Who can multiply and conquer
by the Roman numbers? Lacking
the Arab frenzy of the zero, they
have obsolesced: the butchers
have washed up and left
after having killed and dressed
the bodies of the lambs all night,
and those who never have seen blood awake
can drink it browned
and call the past an unrepeatable mistake
because this circus of their present is all gravy.