Make It New

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2002 by Berger, Bruce

One century after Frederick Jackson Turner

Dismantled our frontier, a balding man

Across the aisle on a coast-to-coast flight

Pulled some papers from his calfskin briefcase,

Scanned them in the laser of his seatlight,

Ripped them in half, then in quarters, and stuffed

Them into a plastic bag. When I returned

To my magazine, he promptly fetched some more,

Held them to the beam and calmly tore,

Dismissing the cart of drinks. Over the Catskills,

Lake Erie, the Mississippi, steadily

Westering, he shed a fine thin scrawl

That documented, I decided, life

Up to here, arid jobs and botched relations,

Marriages and most of all the kids

Who dropped him first and whom he now dismembered

And crammed into the plastic oubliette

He would pitch irretrievably into the first

Receptacle on deplaning. Setting back

His watch and striding toward ground transportation

With a lightened carryon, he would assume

More challenging positions, unentangling

Alliances and roads not previously

Taken, meanwhile pledging to resist

Atlantic urges to turn present joys

Into the tonnage of the written past

Except, perhaps, to let some foster self

Dash off, quixotically, the truly new

On onionskin in calligraphic haiku

To slip between the dense and still inflating

Volumes of our other coastal shelf.