for Joshua Starbuck, master of montage
A Caledonian megalith.
A tinted bather from Cape Ann.
The 1937 kith
and kin of a Kentuckian
beside their Model T sedan.
The Celts. Who set me this arith-
metic of icons? Who began
by pasting in Bob Dylan? Zith-
erpicking rhinestone charlatan.
He tries to be American.
Who tries to be American
as hard as him? Not Aly Khan.
Not George F. Babbitt the Zenith-
ophiliac Zenithian.
As sure as God made Granny Smith
a pricier-sounding product than
the Winesap or the Jonathan,
there is a mystery and myth
to being an American,
and being an American
compounds it. Kurosawa-san,
steady my Nikon while I pan
across the porches of forsyth-
iabedizened Mattapan
in search of... dot dot dot... the plan,
the weltanschauung, the ethnith-
ifying principle a pith
helmeted Oxbridge fancy-dan
could pounce on like a fiend from Ran
and authenticate forthwith.
The cromlech beetles o’ er the frith.
The ultimate American
possession rattles his Kal-Kan,
Prince, you’ re a prince. A dog a man
can talk to. What this caravan
of adumbrations and antith-
esises panteth for is Dith
Pran and the long-lost Mrs. Pran:
Far-fetched, tenacious, captious: fan
tabulously American.