O R A N G E L I G H T O V E R B L U E E X P R E S S I O N
Orange light over
the Palisades'
trees a blue
expression
and the breeze
sighs primitively as ever
through the legs of Kosciuszko's horse.
In California
it is five
but the same sun
will set
as the same comered step
outside for a smoke
to watch a jet
soundlessly trail
a sleeve of white smoke --
poof!
the cannon on the hill
it is Tadeusz
Kosciuszko coaching
the revolutionary blues
in their artillery
and a hundred miles up
the Hudson
he is thinking up
and engineering
new fortifications
for West Point
pausing
in his garden
to think of Poland
and Ludwika
Sosnowski whose father
would not give his
consent
so he upped and went
to America
with a blue expression on his face
but an orange light
in his Lithuanian eyes
which the ladies
construed
as gallantry
of a romantic nature
which the officers
construed
as gallantry
of a military
or revolutionary nature
but which Washington
questioned
so he cast
an aluminum colored look
on that forever innovating Pole
who decorated
the Grand Ballroom
for the celebration
of the English evacuation
of Charleston, North Carolina
with garlands of magnolia
and paper flowers
just to please
Mrs. Nathaniel Greene
who left
this country
forever
with a testament
in his own good English
"I, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, being just in my
departure from America, do hereby declare
and direct that should I make no other test-
amentary disposition of my property in the
United States thereby authorize my friend
Thomas Jefferson to employ the whole thereof
in purchasing negroes from among his own as
any others and giving them liberty in my name,
in giving them an education in trades or other-
wise, and in having them instructed for their
new condition in the duties of morality which
may make them good neighbors, good fathers or
mothers, husbands or wives, and in their duties
as citizens, teaching them to be defenders of
their liberty and country and of the good order
of society and in whatsoever may make them
happy and useful, and I make the said Thomas
Jefferson my executor of this."
-- the jet vanishes
over the horizon
as its smoke crumbles
drifts
into streaky cirrus
high
above the running
orange light
over the deepened blue
and the breeze.