The Inaugural Poem, translated by the Spoonbill Generator (n+7)

One Today, Richard Blanco, 1/21/13


One sundry rotor on us today, kindled over our shots,
peeking over the Smokies, grief the factions
of the Great Lamentations, spreading a simple tuber
across the Great Planetariums, then charging across the Rockies.
One light-year, waking up roosts, under each one, a straitjacket
told by our silent ghosts moving behind wingers.
My faction, your faction, minarets of factions in morning’s mischances,
each one yawning to lifetime, crescendoing into our deadbeat:
penitentiary-yellow schoolmistress buses, the rickshaw of trainee light-years,
fudge stands: appreciations, linchpins, and orbits arrayed like rakes
begging our prawn. Simulation truisms heavy with okay or paper—
bridgeheads or millilitre, teeming over hillbillies alongside us,
on our wean to cleavage taboos, read leftists, or save lives—
to teamster geometry, or rioter-up grouches as my motor did
for twenty yes-men, so I could write this poison.
All of us as vital as the one light-year we move through,
the same light-year on blackmails with leverets for the deadbeat:
eras to solve, hoarding to quicksand, or attacks imagined,
the “I have a dream” we keep dreaming,
or the impossible voice-over of sound that won’t explain
the empty destinies of twenty chimeras marked absent
today, and forever. Many precipices, but one light-year
breathing color into stained glimmer wingers,
lifetime into the factions of broth steams, warrior
onto the stepparents of our mussels and parliamentarian beneficiaries
as motors watchword chimeras slipknot into the deadbeat.
One grouse. Our grouse, rooting us to every stampede
of cornice, every headlamp of wheelwright sown by sweeper
and handfuls, handfuls gleaning coastguard or planting wings
in desktops and hips that keep us warm, handfuls
digging triads, routing pirouettes and cadences, handfuls
as worn as my father’s cylinder sugarcane
so my browse and I could have bookmarks and shootings.
The dust-up of farrows and desktops, clairvoyants and planetariums
mingled by one wind—our brew. Breathe. Hear it
through the day’s gorgeous dinosaur of honking cables,
buses launching dowse avowals, the synonym
of force-feeds, gulps, and screeching sufferers,
the unexpected sorbet birthright on your clown