Cumberland Poetry Review, 2004
TAKING A SHOWER WITH DANIEL ELLSBERG
By Philip Dacey
I think history has walked into the shower room
where I'm cooling under a steady spray after racquetball
when Daniel Ellsberg enters naked
and asks me if he can borrow some shampoo.
I know I'll never get back the green ribbon
he presses onto his palm but that's okay,
it isn't every day I get to watch, while pretending
not to, a supporting actor in the great American drama
lathering his woolly head until I soon begin
to confuse him with America itself and think
I'm watching my country working its way down
to soaping its genitals and asshole.
It does not matter I heard him speak
last night at this prairie college where he'd come
to instruct the corn, to teach it to grow,
and that I tasselled and tasselled--
I am not prepared for this, unless I have been
preparing for it all my life, as fresh from a swim
in waters most likely shallower than he's been used to
he seems to have stripped off with his clothes
his merely personal self, as well as his public mask,
to reveal the vulnerable and aging body
of a nation whose struggle became his own,
a nation defenseless against itself.
Maybe it's all just soap in my eyes but
his fatty and falling dugs seem to me
those of an old mother of many children,
whose fighting among themselves weighs upon her,
and his bony legs down which water pours
are the weak pillars of democracy, hairy
with freedoms that protect even
the enemies of freedom, so that I think
if Whitman heard America singing I see her
showering, her varied body parts I see,
including a gut like a portmanteau of classified documents,
about to unclassify themselves forever.
But now I've dropped my bar of soap, which skids
across the floor to Ellsberg, or Columbia ,
who scoops it up and hands it back to me
like Liberty passing the torch and suggesting
I clean up my act. I want to ask about a patriot's
oscillation between pain and pride, but I can only say
thanks and attack my waxy ears--the citizen as listener--
as the all-American androgyne stands still
under the showerhead, eyes closed in what I assume's
a dream of washing a war right out of that hair
till it's squeaky peaceful. Meanwhile, I can't rub off
a question: does our history leave us naked, revealing us
to ourselves, a self we scrub and scrub in vain
to sanitize, or do we dress ourselves after the shower
in the history we tell the world and each other
to make our nakedness more presentable?
By now the steam is so bad I swear I see
the ghost of Lyndon Johnson writhing in it like a dog
he picked up by his ears and the Pentagon papers fallen
where the draining water returns them to pulp.
Suddenly I notice the shower room is a long tunnel
at one end of which there is light, but I
have had enough of light and move toward the dark end,
leaving Ellsberg fishing, blinded momentarily, for his towel.
Willow Springs, 1998
