Take My Country

 

They say they are patriots and that they love their country. But they do not love its lakes or rivers or skies or soil or Billie Holiday or Henry Threadgill or Toni Morrison or Ishmael Reed or a gift/a kiss/a moment of unexpected kindness between two people. They do not love the accidental thought that became a poem or a melody that was forgotten later. It was so powerful, like shimmering blue sound roaring out of a cave on the California coast. 

They do not love the song improvised in 3/4 time on a clarinet in a subway station or was it a stage, the Velvet Lounge perhaps, that made the listener picture a fawn walking out of the forest to the edge of a meadow covered in the mist of the morning to nibble on wildflowers. Mwata Bowden was the player’s name.

They say they are patriots and that they love their country. But they do not love whale song. They do not love the orcas swimming beside Kwakiutl long boats that break the waves, that break the rays of the distant sun. They do not love Michael McClure, Henry Miller, Richard Brautigan. They do not love Diane Di Prima. They do not love Fannie Lou Hamer. They do not love the Staple Singers. They do not love Bob Dylan. They do not love Mr. Tambourine Man or The Byrds. They do not love Woody Guthrie or Cisco Houston.

They do not love Mark Rothko. Not even the painting of his that hangs in the Art Institute and that emanates an almost unspeakable force that sometimes feels like love and that sometimes feels like loss. It is a force you can also hear radiating inside of your head like song.

They do not love the Fuel Café, which is now closed. They do not love the coffee at Fuel Café. It was coffee that everyone hated, but loved that they hated it. They do not love Dave at the Fuel Café, seated at the white formica table beside a tower of books. They do not love Deacon at the Fuel Café who sat reading zines, his eyeglasses hanging down upon his chest, suspended by a drugstore gold plated chain. They do not love Dano at the Fuel. Dano wrote 4000 limericks in the 1990s. And then they were gone. He went into the hospital and then the 4000 limericks were gone. He showed me the designs that he made with colored markers while in the hospital. They were curled and swirling shapes with colors that looked like they could have been painted on the backs of desert turtles. I still have the drawings and look at them. They do not love these drawings.