I had to write my father one more time,
My last not having opened up the springs
Of his compassion and his bank account.
I’ll bend as low as he can make me bend,
And lower still, if that is what it takes
To help him to persuade himself afresh
That he is not the man he knows he is.
If I pretend to honor his advice
When he pretends to have advice to give
He may forget himself just long enough
To render up just what paternal care
Might owe to filial duty fully done,
And fully done with, soon enough, I hope.

Pecunia non olet, though it be
All raised by taxing pisspots in the stews
Or selling wormy meal and raddled meat
To all my classmates at not quite a bargain
But cheap enough the College has to buy
And dear enough to pay part of his debts,
Except the debt of shame to me, which mounts
With every glance I get across the plate
I too am eating from, the last of all.

Perhaps old Mister Fox gave an advance
To keep our hopes alive about his will,
Or make my father soon forget he saw
That skinny hand just brush my sister’s breast
As if by accident another time
While he was grinning in my father’s face
And she looked far away and kept her peace
Like someone very used to keeping peace.
It’s like enough just at the very last
Old Fox will fox the devil of his soul
By dowering Savannah’s biggest church
With some new fund they’ll have to name for him
For doling Bibles to the Cherokees.
We put out honor like a plate of tarts,
And passed him samples, but he didn’t buy.

And so the steward’s son must beg his Pap
For some one else’s money for a coat,
All blue and buff, and buttoned up with brass
For him to cut a striking figure in
As President of the Euphradian Club
And this year’s Convocation Orator.
And for that hour, not one of them will mark
How rancid vittles bought that coat for me.
But what bought their fine coats? A draft on God?
More likely charity by Oglethorpe
Sprung out of Newgate Grandee’s grandpapa
And set him here to found his dynasty
By selling slaveships candles and salt horse.
It isn’t how you put it in your hand
But how you carry it that makes the coin.

Why, last month Tripp and Brock, the sharpest blades
That Carolina College ever taught,
Or didn’t teach, allowed to grace its halls,
Reached for a plate of trout — my father’s trout,
Good trout for once — at almost the same time,
And “Sir, please drop your hand, I must insist.”
“I am not wont to take commands from you.”
“Nor I to be rebuked by such as you.”
Well, that was that, though they’d been bedfellows
For eighteen months (and fellow patrons too
Of yellow Sally Ann, I understand;
Perhaps Tripp passed the clap through her to Brock).
Two mornings later by the Congaree
They had to measure fifteen paces out
All dressed in ruffles and new-polished boots
With two matched smoothbore pistols from a box.
The neighbor boys had climbed the trees around,
And Staverton, Brock’s second, gaily called
“Now boys, it’s best you quit those trees right now.
God only knows where Mr. Tripp will shoot.”
Well shoot he did, right through Brock’s shoulderblade,
Not dangerously, it seemed, till fever came.
Tripp stood discretely back behind the pews
With weed in hat, to hear the eulogy.

Two fewer pairs of ears to hear my speech;
Two fewer pairs of lips to move to praise
In a Mesmeric trance, against their will;
Two fewer compliments I’ll have to parse
To see if they’re well meant, or if it matters
Whether they did, or could, make head or tail
Of any thing I might have had to say,
Did they but listen closely, which they can’t.

Here’s what I’ll say the Thursday after next:
Who is the Lion’s kin, the Eagle’s son?
The man for whom all having done is dead.
Towering genius disdains a beaten path.
It seeks out regions hitherto unknown.
It cannot merely add story to story
Of another’s monument, another’s fame.
It cannot serve, spurns glory second-hand,
And scorns the footsteps even of the great.
Each act, once done, it’s just begun to hate;
Each word, once spoken, already is a lie.
Ambition is not lullabied with praise.
Its wakeful genius, spurred and stayed with doubt,
Saves it alike from joy and from despair.
It is not hobbled by another’s scruple,
The envy-stung revenge of paltry men
Whose being good is merely being weak
In force of will, or weak in appetite,
Or weak in all but sour self-righteousness.
It stifles in the moment of repose.
Ambition seeks the best, not just the good,
And of itself new makes both good and fair
Till all things wear its color, do its will
Except itself, its one unmastered thing.
It rears itself out of its own idea.
Napoleon, though born to blush unseen,
A youth to fortune and to fame unknown,
With no resources but his mind, no friend
But genius, and no rank but dignity,
With his own hands set on his head his crown,
Drove half the kings of Europe from their thrones,
Saved his Republic, then made it serve him,
And gave his men, mere mortals, scores of thousands,
Some piece of greatness, even in their graves.
No history caused him, he was history’s cause;
No tide in the affairs of men or states
Swept him before — he was himself that tide;
Loved Liberty, and broke it on his knee;
Loved France, and made of France a flame so bright
That nothing’s left but ashes there, still hot,
Still smouldering, could he blow it back to life.
He had no party more than lightning does,
As strong for life as death, like desert sun,
Whose only aim is but to be and blaze.
Greatness makes the rod it’s measured by,
And drives the causes that it seems to serve,
For any ready cause will serve the ready,
A fulcrum for the force to move a world.
It thirsts and burns for life, and it will have it,
If not enslaving freemen, then freeing slaves.