To Disenchantment

by Rick Hilles

…The future is propaganda. So is grass.
—Joseph Brodsky

I praise the sham in shambles, the hoax exposed.
The huckster’s smirk, and the illusionist’s oops!
And when a cow pie lands in the right face.
I praise the scam that scrams, the jilted lover
      who disregards the teleprompters and clearly
      goes for broke as they cut to an infomercial.
And I praise that I’m not even tempted to be sold.
But if I were, please throw a very wet sock at me!

I praise the sunset that moves behind a cloud.
And the grass that Whitman loved, even if
      Joseph Brodsky was right: it is propaganda.
(Forgive me, Uncle Walt—I know that’s not
      what you meant—but what for you was a
      “uniform hieroglyphic” is now a DDT-tautology.)
I praise those who walk back others’ tantrums
      clearly lying when they say they were joking.
And I even praise all nascent immune systems
      that need our germs to realize themselves.
And bright ideas revealed in funhouse mirrors.

I praise the romance delayed to drive up ratings.
The shamelessly sleazy ad campaign. The easy
      to spot out rhetoric of church and state.
I praise those who are equally unconvinced that
      we’ll ever know what happened in our lifetimes.
And I praise the unlovely fragrance it all exudes,
      revealing just enough for us to know ourselves.
And I praise (almost!) the evidence that never comes.
      All bunk defunct, all ballyhoo removed.

And I praise what at once raises my red flags.
Even the cringe-worthy salesman’s “Trust me!”
But I will honor the first man, woman, or child
      who approaches me without cunning or guile
      or subterfuge of any kind to say something
I’ve never heard before, even something about
      the grass, bringing it to me with both hands,
      asking, “Hey, Mister! Do you know what this is?”
And I will praise how far we’re willing to go to see
      the grass together, as through a microscope
      so that the fire in every cell ignites us too!

Rick Hilles, a recipient of a Fulbright, a Whiting, and the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, is the author of Brother Salvage and A Map of the Lost World, both with the University of Pittsburgh Press. Other recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Five Points, Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, The Nation, New Letters, The New Republic, Paris Review, Poetry, Salmagundi, Smartish Pace, The Southern Review and Tar River Poetry. He is an associate professor at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches in the English Department and MFA Program. He lives in Nashville, TN and Carrboro, NC.