"In February" by Hugh McCulloch Jr.

In gratitude for spending Thanksgiving in Massachusetts with my family at my childhood home, here is a lovely poem by my great-great uncle, Hugh McCulloch (1869-1902), one of a generation of Harvard fin de siecle poets who died young and who was notable enough to be mentioned by fellow Harvardian Wallace Stevens in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction." Taken from his final volume, Written in Florence, this early spring lyric touches on the alienations of forbidden gay love, the weight of history on reincarnated souls, and the spiritual values of despair the Decadents cultivated.

The trees, all dripping since the tardy dawn

     With dewy raindrops fathered in the night,

Half shuddered, shedding on the mossy lawn

     Their drops of light.

The many branches seen against the sky 

     (That rain-dark grey against the unclouding blue!),

That forest multitude which stretched on high,

     Made earth seem new.

And we two wandering 'midst the craven trees,

     Together close, my arm about you thrown,

Our eyes made dreamy by the rain-wet breeze —

     We felt alone.

The world was maddened by some subtile sting;

     Some last resistance to supreme despair

Crushing to life each gently slumbering thing

     Which languished there.

Our spirits, drowsy in their fleshly tomb,

     Half rose to life, and half they seemed to know 

The wonders which from Nature's mighty womb

     Were soon to grow;

Half knew where, in the vast abyss of time,

     Their past had been, and what their name and place;

Their monstrous deeds; — where sung in buried rhyme

     Their primal grace.

The naked boughs which hung a-quivering there,

     Which shrank with fear through all their vague delight,

Were yet compelled to yield, compelled to bear, 

     By Nature's might.

Our souls, however, seemed like things apart;

     They turned again, for not yet was the dawn.

Desire, the Spring sent quivering through the heart, —

     The soul slept on.

The Scarab, or Complicity in Fort Wayne, Indiana

In memory of my Great-Great-Great Grandfather Hugh McCulloch, born on this day, my birthday, in 1808.

“What is threatening to collapse the dollar today is not that it is not backed by gold. It is that 99 percent of the U.S. money supply is owed back to private lenders with interest, and the money to cover the interest does not exist until new loans are taken out to cover it. Money created privately as multiple “loans” against a single “reserve” is fraudulent on its face, whether the “reserve” is a government bond or gold bullion. The private banks are not really creating credit and advancing it to us, counting on our future productivity to pay it off, the way they once did under the functional facade of fractional reserve lending. Instead, they are vacuuming up our money and lending it back to us at higher rates. In the shadow banking system, they are sucking up our real estate and lending it back to our pension funds and mutual funds at compound interest. The result is a mathematically impossible pyramid scheme, which is inherently prone to systemic failure.” – Ellen Brown

You were sick the night the greenbacks died
In that brain-splat show of force in old Ford’s Theater,
And as they buried any thought we could be free
You pinned the cockroach to your suit in fine obeisance
And let them mint the credits from thin air,
So Gould who stole the nation’s gold
And Morgan who had armed the South
And the House-picked team of psychopaths
Could be owed at last the lives of all your blood.

I for one was collateralized at birth
For the debts owed before more credit could be secured,
But now it’s gotten to the point that you can’t
Even see “It’s a Wonderful Life” any more
—It’s not in any store or TV station—
More mortgages have been re-sold
Than there were deeds to write the debts to begin with,
And all the bets that they would fall have been cashed in
And all the gold to help the banks survive procured
By throwing people on the street without legality.

That’s just the way the system has to work;
One has no right to life save banker’s blessings,
No right to think that counters their control.
They own one’s house, one’s car, the air one borrows.
One pays in exponentials for the right.
Education only matters ‘cos expensive
Just as warfare only matters ‘cos it’s debt.
The scarab only cares that it is owed more
But there is no more debt the world can hold.

Even my grandma’s bank stocks now are worthless,
What you bequeathed to us as your last wisdom.
And I, who write poems from the scarab’s droppings
See them fly away as something worthless, what everything
But money somehow is, that once was not a thing at all
But a relation, like I to you, a long-lost son
Who learned the way to speak the propaganda
That cannot touch the horns of this dilemma:

The question “are we able to wake up?”
“Can we raise the dead – investments – from their sleep?”
“If we threw on shadows light would they be gone?”

The Two Hughs

Like a Counting Crows song but in Chinese,

Seamless, life surprises that way, something

Screaming silently, the whispers suppressed,

Enough to make the giant portrait speak

Of every shameful look it has endured,

All the Victorian shunning of what

Doesn't subdue or exploit or drop lures.

The face though is actually beautiful,

It holds acceptance that truths from past lives

Can never be told inside of this one,

There are just symbols, only for the wise

Of lavender and a velvet box of cigars.

But it turns out the tables are, for that

Portrait the family agreed to let slip

Faster than the out-of-time Granddad clock

And the piano that left the house an echo

For it held all the sound made in it and then 

Unmade and unremembered ended up

At an auction in Philadelphia,

A private collector and coterie

Of eager, authenticating scholars —

If you have to ask how many million

It fetched you are a philistine indeed,

For here was a Poet and Painter entwined

Escaping all the ghosts they'd been living:

Southern fried chicken for the hero who'd

Devised Jim Crow (and where I got my name),

And vermeil silver served at the White House

As the cross of gold was laid just like tracks

To crucify the Arkansas masses.

The eyes in the portrait were on something else:

Lyon's creamy clouds, Lord Byron's atelier,

Stanza 8 of the Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

— Ah, those Decadents, so willing to die to live

But, in this case, a cousin, from the town

Who, though far away, died far too young.

His name lived on in the name I came from,

Though it was always disguised, kept silent,

Only the portrait everyone came to hate

By a fellow misunderstood cousin —

Every lineage has such detritus

To mar the heroic war made in name

Of the Lord, to scratch the provenance of

Too much of the period furniture.

There are always two hues of blue, eyes that knew

What to do, and eyes that could only see

What only eyes open could view,

What might yet be if a world could soften.

He was born with the name of the hero

But chose not that road, but the perverse

Quantity, too rarefied still for all

But breathing, the breath soft grief gave to him,

My granddad, that almost invisible man

Who helped everyone and tottered under,

The family assumed, his magnificent name

While he who his life remembered went unseen.

There's a portrait of him, an infant alive

In the throes of grief, by that same sweet painter.

It's out there somewhere, worth more than a song

And more than he ever scraped together.

Lexington has dust. The soul's immortal.

The bodies now are rearranged for show

Where he, once called Stonewall, is buried,

The one who once carried what I carry.

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