On the United States, Considered as a Landscape
Not a building, this earth, not a cage,
these waters: the country is
a body, to be treated so: when
the weather is mild, think
of the past, when the weather is mean,
think of the future. Men do
thus, and evolve a metropolis
from litter: leaves, straw, floating
bottles and boxes, a mainland which,
like anything else, cannot
be made all at once to drop its rags,
suddenly to stand naked,
fully disclosed. Time- it has taken
time to collect in wide pools
even the beginnings, skeleton
and cartilege, arteries
and bladder: if our Sublime cannot
rise above such things as beer
cans and plastic picnic forks, it is
not all we say, it cannot
really be the God in which we trust.
Image borrowed from: http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/oceanography-book/Images/ixtox1.jpg
