Fait Accompli

I wrote a poem for competitions. It failed to win them. So now I am going to work it into F.A.: the Napoleon theme is central to it, after all.

‘Kansas City, Kansas’

I
At clodville, on The Battleground of Freedom, along damp banks
In scarce-sunned woods – a ghost-verge relict, the Garden of the West -
Lungwort Oysterleaf grows bright green, and youth-pink blooms
Come as fading blue as the airless blood of field-dead men:
This is where I played emperor while the unregarding rabble (all rabbit heart)
Feigned buck-uppishness and called me Bonesapart.
Stalking the Kaw with bulrush sword, the slashed sky rings with shouts for my mount,
Wetted toes worry the mud at water’s lip, and there’s a whiff of grapeshot
To the rotted weed silent currents shoot south,
Where clearer flows meet the Dark River.

Battle joined and ended, the survivors retire, smeared cheeks and dry mouth.
I think, as usual, of eighteen hundred and three,
When with martial calculus you studied the accounts
And sold us these millions of unsurveyed acres, a leaf-swatch of continent,
For eighty million francs (a soldier’s supper, we thought),
To force with warships and barges a reckoning, and follow Caesar’s wake:
But the dénouement was wrong – and a dozen years long.
Eighteen hundred and four brought Lewis and Clark to Kaw Point
Three months after the Duc d’Enghien drank a lead cocktail and
Kissed the cobbles in the Fortress of Vincennes.

On the quick march home with my boko in the van,
Tired enough to eat, screwed-up eyes seek Dunand,
The shoulders droop – I can smell it from the porch;
She’s dancing with the griddle: it’s nigger and halitosis again.
My weary chops wanted Poulet Sauté Marengo;
When the slick mess hit the plate, these fingers ached to crack crawfish claws.
Suppertime was thinking time, but I was too green to know
That in every Little Boney lies Jean-Baptiste Carrier – the insane swish
Of unsheathed épée. ‘I trussed the opposite sexes two by two, naked and arranged
As if they were coupling,’ he bragged with lunatic glee.

II
Puny Nabulio knew the maquis; the pale little Corsican played alongside
Death-thickets in which aromatic oils met fatal alkaloids,
Where brigands and hunters trod stony goat tracks and
Birds died by lime and net and shot.
In Paris, hot as a pistol (but with a womanly figure),
Napoléon – first went the ‘di’, then the ‘de’ -
Now brigadier-general in the artillery, knew his cannons
Would quell muskets, pikes, swords, and clubs; but before all that
Lanjuinais foresaw civil war spreading its ravages everywhere
And tearing France apart, the monster Dictatorship advancing over piles of ruins and corpses.
(How did he elude the blade, Carrier, and the hedgerow-sniffing hounds?)
Blood-encrusted, doomed demagogues became seers too.
‘You will follow me!’ Danton screamed. ‘Your house will be levelled and the ground where it stood will be
          sowed with salt!’
Lucidity returned to The Drowner of Nantes: ‘We shall all be guillotined, one after another.’
Ungovernable cannibals died, so did Holy Joes;
Napoléon, immutable, cheated at games; the slaps and pinches
Were just as strong, and more often than involuntary cries
Came hurried smiles and ‘Qu’il est drôle, Bonaparte!’

III
While Desaix lived there was always time to win another battle,
But the Austrians ironed him out. (I’m a student of history; this happens a lot.)
I no longer slosh in the shallows of the Kaw, but I still think about
Eighteen hundred and seven.
This is my River Niemen, so where is the barge? Where is the tent?
No boats, no oarsmen, attend to me: I’m no high-much-a-much, no emperor
Gross with victory, and the expansive plaudits of po-faced sycophants,
Hand rested on protuberant gut, the nervous twitches checked for now.
There’s a will to power in the Navel of the Nation:
The past is screaming, and I won’t stop my sighs and tears.

They kept him far away and close on a horrible rock;
Black basalt cliffs threw jags into the unending sea;
In gunpowder soil, thin lines of gumwoods set drooping flowers
Adry and unfed by the clockwork mists.
The handkerchief on his still-smooth face,
For bathetic rounds of blind-man’s-buff,
Sometimes slipped with an artful nudge.
(What’s a bit of chicanery between friends? he reasoned,
Then ran along in his unself-conscious way that was
Something between a strut and a waddle.)

Before I throw the stone, my fingers touch its rasping face -
Three seconds later it’s sinking in the Kaw.
No more activité, no more vitesse.
In your undressed thoughts you muttered ‘À la tête de l’armée’,
Unready to admit that besides the million, the thirty-eight per cent,
Who died under you, you first did away with common sense.
Those grey eyes, wet with pain from calomel, would not see
The legacy of Acre as hurt choked your stuffings.
I think of you often, because half the fear of dying is knowing you’ll be forgotten,
And there are hatfuls of worse times, worse places, than now, in K.C.K.

——-
NOTES
Historical information is drawn from The Age of Napoleon by Will and Ariel Durant, Napoleon: His Wives and Women by Christopher Hibbert, and Paris in the Terror by Stanley Loomis.

l. 1: clodville, a hick town; The Battleground of Freedom, Kansas.
l. 2: Garden of the West, Kansas.
ll. 3-4: The plant’s flowers mature from pink to blue.
l. 5: rabbit heart: from rabbit-hearted (cowardly).
l. 6: buck-uppishness, bravery.
l. 7: Kaw, the Ojibwa name for the Kansas River.
l. 8: whiff of grapeshot, Napoleon’s description of his cannonade, responsible for up to 300 deaths, in defence of the Convention on the Day of the Sections [13 Vendémiaire (5 October), 1795].
l. 10: Dark River, the Missouri River, known for its turbidity.
ll. 12-16: The Louisiana Purchase was concluded to finance Napoleon’s planned invasion of Britain.
l. 18: Between 1804 and 1806, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark made the first successful overland expedition to the American west coast.
ll. 19-20: Louis-Antoine-Henri de Bourbon-Condé, Duc d’Enghien (1772-1804) was arrested during the countermeasures against the Royalist-Chouan insurgency. He was tried by a military court, convicted of treason, and shot.
l. 21: boko, nose.
l. 22: Dunand, Napoleon’s chef, creator of the Emperor’s favourite dish, Chicken Marengo.
l. 24: nigger and halitosis, liver and onions.
ll. 28-30: Carrier (1756-1794) was made représentant-en-mission for the Loire in October 1793. Based in Nantes, he instituted les noyades (the drownings), in which prisoners bound in ‘republican marriages’ were piled on to barges, which were then sunk. He was guillotined in November, 1794.
l. 31: Nabulio, family nickname for Napoleon; pale little Corsican, taken from Hibbert.
l. 35: hot as a pistol, tough; womanly figure, Napoleon’s body shape was noted by many observers.
ll. 39-42: The words are Comte Jean-Denis Lanjuinais’. Lanjuinais (1753-1827) fled the Terror in Paris and went into hiding in the west. He re-took his seat in the Convention on 8 March, 1795.
ll. 43-44: His denunciation of Robespierre.
ll. 48-50: The cheating at games and harsh physical affection of the young rowdy never left Napoleon. See Hibbert. The quote is Josephine de Beauharnais’.
l. 51: General Louis Desaix de Veygoux (1768-1800) rallied the French for a counter-attack at the battle of Marengo, during which he was killed.
ll. 54-57: After the battle of Friedland, the Prussians and Russians requested a truce. Napoleon and Alexander met on a barge in the middle of the River Niemen at Tilsit, where they concluded the peace and formed an alliance against England. Each thought he had won a strategic victory over the other.
l. 58: Napoleon suffered from epilepsy and nervous tics.
l. 59: Navel of the Nation, Kansas.
l. 60: sighs and tears, ears.
1. 61: horrible rock, one of Napoleon’s descriptions of Saint Helena.
ll. 66-70: Napoleon played blind-man’s-buff with the Balcombe sisters on Saint Helena. The description of Napoleon’s walk is Betsy Balcombe’s, quoted by Hibbert.
l. 73: Napoleon’s motto was ‘Action and speed’.
l. 74: ‘At the head of the army’ were Napoleon’s last words.
ll. 75-76: The mortality rate in the Grande Armée.
sl. 78: The unsuccessful siege of Acre was Napoleon’s first defeat.

From an e-mail Benny sent:

My client is going bankrupt and they basically support a large chunk of Hong Kong’s economy. I am seeing the building fall from the P.O.V. of a wrecking ball. Very interesting. 

Troublesome, worrying, interesting.

I’m going to use that.

I’m reading Burgess’ Enderby tetralogy, which is superb. From Inside Mr Enderby:

‘There,’ he said again, clasping her, stroking and soothing. It was a very narrow bed. This, he kept reminding himself, was his bride, an intelligent and desirable young woman and it was time, under the thunder and rain, to be thinking of performing, that is to say consummating, that is to say. He stealthily felt his way down to find out what was his body’s view of this constatation, but all was quiet there, as though he were calmly reading Jane Austen.

‘Sometimes a manuscript is like bread dough. You have to abuse it.’
                                                                     — Carolyn Chute