This burnt plate is place in the sun of the son of Henry Clay,
a spit-earth burial in Monterrey, in the mesquite of Hidalgo
up at Encantada, where bones of the whoreson Rebs
are sucked by robbers plucking teeth and amulets
off the dead of Los Lobos, mourned by angels Whittier
called souls of the emphatic, slave trade gone
to grapeshot wounds for another American monsoon.
Zach Taylor's made Homeric here, as dog-trot rhythms
of Trafalgar bear this son of anti-abolitionists home.
Before the Great Revival, a brother's breakdown
at Blue Licks Spa brings ague to the senator, his pistols
packed are signature the boy's body travels by North
to Nachitoches, back to the family plot at Ashland,
out by the conical ice-house where he as a boy
chased thoroughbreds. That bit of whooping cough
at West Point did him in in Santa Anna's noose
of captive infantry: coffee-slack, green-scurvied pool
of pickled pork, a sutler's blood in embers
by the cookfire, last affaire d'coeur before the dust
of ritual embalm. Son of Clay or Apollo or Abraham,
rest in peace now, in the arms of an absent howling mother.