Made to Explode

pensive, frock coat unbuttoned, larger than once planned, and if he were to stand his head would nearly scrape the ceiling. What if that is Robert E. Lee’s face, sculpted into the waves of hair? No telling of the Union without the telling of the Confederacy. No stranger a feat than infusing Alabama marble with paraffin to better let the sky’s light in. The sculptor took these hands from a May 1860 cast, before he had signed any proclamations or called 75,000 volunteers to an army. In May 1860, he was only a Republican nominee. Leonard Volk came to Illinois, and as he prepared the plaster he asked Abraham Lincoln for two gestures: one hand a fist, and in the other, something to be held loosely. In the statue this postures openness, conciliation. In reality, Lincoln was holding a broom handle he’d fetched from his tool shed.

CHERRY TREE REBELLION

To save the cherry trees—O Cissy O Eliza O Clara O Catherine—you buckled your shoes and descended. Fifty of you marched your petition to the President’s house; a flimflam, he called it, cooked up by the newspapers. The next day, a hundred and fifty of you marched to the Tidal Basin. You grabbed the shovels from the Civilian Conservation Corps, refilling holes. You hitched your skirts and chained yourselves to the trunks. The Secretary of the Interior sent lunch over, and coffee, cup after cup, coaxing your bladders toward betrayal. O Cissy O Eliza O Clara O Catherine, O Valkyries in muslin, I imagine you staying deep into the night of November 1938. For the first two hours, you talk. In the third hour, you sing. In the fifth hour, your stoles come alive: fresh dew on the eyes of each fox, fur damp, an exhalation that fogs as if breath. But you’d already gone home to your warm beds. Roosevelt ordered the graveyard crew to dig fast, and the men did.

ROOSEVELT, MIDNIGHT

The Depression is a crash of water; terraced flow narrates the TVA dam. Carnelian granite erupts to blocks, naked in their etched enjambments: I hate / war. A man leans in to his radio. The breadline waits in bronze. Eleanor stands in her resolute suit to address the United Nations. Everywhere, his words. Missing: her words. Missing: Lucy Mercer. Missing: FDR’s cigarette, clenched at a rakish angle. For his version of the story, head to 9^th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, and look for a block the size of a desk, with In Memory of and the years of his birth and death. That’s his version. This version is an amusement park. The memorial opened and, four years later, they added a wheelchair. The stone is beautiful when snow falls. The stone is beautiful when the cherry blossoms accumulate, windswept. This sculpted wall is supposed to speak of WPA, CCC, the alphabet agencies. But its Braille dots are oversized beyond any one fingertip. This is gibberish, a visitor says, feeling the spaces between.

EINSTEIN, MIDNIGHT

The memorial’s shape is cumulative, clay on clay. His brow wrinkles, his sweater sags, toes flex gently in open sandals. What you see is his 1953 face combined with an imagined body. Mass is the presence of energy, an object’s resistance to anything other than what it is already doing. Yes, you may sit on Albert’s lap. Look past your feet; those 2,700 studs map what we knew of a particular day’s sky. Did you know he patented a refrigerator with no moving parts? His fridge collaborator was the one who asked him to cosign the letter that said, It may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium. Later, he’d say that if he’d known Germans would fail, he’d have never urged Americans to succeed. When he applied for clearance on the Manhattan Project, our Army refused. Now, an artist works into the dawn hours, looping with her crochet needle until his figure is shrouded in pink, purple, and teal. Yarn-bombing, we call this. Anything, in the right hands, can be made to explode.

TITANIC, MIDNIGHT

A dollar toward the cause came from Col. John Jacob Astor’s own pocketbook, paid to Mrs. Archibald Forbes. They had settled up after a bridge game on the night of April 14, 1912. His body would eventually be inventoried, as they all were. No. 124, male, about age fifty, light hair and moustache. He wore a blue serge suit and a flannel shirt, “J.J.A.” on the collar. He wore brown boots, a belt with gold buckle, diamonds in his cuff links and ring. That’s not Astor seen here though, arms thrown wide. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney is said to have based the face on her brother, who went down with the Lusitania. The figure designed by Whitney is only vaguely sexed, not clothed so much as draped. Erected by the Women of America, says the inscription, meaning twenty-five thousand women who mailed in their dollar bills. This is the second installation. Officials disappeared the memorial for thirty years before it reappeared down by Fort McNair, saying, We need to make way for the Kennedy Center. The construction was a convenient excuse. There had been miscalculations and, in 1936, an unusual snowmelt. No one could quite shake the memory of the Great Potomac Flood: how waters had lapped the feet, then the knees, waist, the lithe pectorals, before finally crowning his brow.

AMERICAN ROME

Marion “Shepilov” Barry Jr. (1936–2014)

Marionberry: jams of Washington

state. I thought they were mocking this city.

Take a mayor and boil his sugar down—

spoon-spreadable, sweet. We take presidents

and run them in a game’s fourth-inning stretch.

We take Bullets and turn them to Sea Dogs.

Remember that vote, that ballot? Sea Dogs

Dragons Stallions Express. The Washington

Wizards was no more or less of a stretch.

We wave gavels like wands in this city.

We’re the small town in which a president

can plant some roses. Each time I sit down

to try and