1. Monticello
Well, no one would mistake it for a farm
house—Ash Lawn down the road or, God forbid,
an ordinary mansion. And wonders
abound from the antlers and bones to maps
and Old Masters. Picture him on the floor
with a book, says the guide, papers paying
court in their piles around him while his man
servant tries to straighten up. Here he caged
his mockingbirds, talking between themselves
while he rested from writing by working
“keys and locks and small chains, iron and brass.”
The alcove bed divides the private rooms
from themselves, the polygraph always poised
for his doubled words, revolving bookstand
always at attention, awash with light
from the mirrored walls. Windows serve the cause
from one side or the other all day; fields
fall away in every direction from
this seat of “more freedom, more ease, and less
misery.” Of course it is dark below,
a passage from the kitchen plowed beneath
the heart of the famed circular floor plan
to a dumbwaiter that invisibly
lifted wine to the dining room. And look
at the clocks and weathervanes and the way
the roundabout roads and fences kept
his time and his boundaries, his daily
cycle of work and respite unsullied
by danger of chaos. You wouldn’t make
the error of thinking it’s not unique,
not with the dome hovering above you,
not with all of the novel ideas it
enthrones, but from a distance it’s only
a big house, with tourists steered around and
around, going through those same old motions.
2. The House, the Church, the Mall
And what’s the word on Paul Revere these days?
Still in Charlestown watching for the light, still
ringing in the belltower of King’s Chapel.
He’s still lying, down in the Granary,
with Sam Adams, James Otis, John Hancock,
our many founding fathers all revered
under the cover of their stately stones.
In the portrait by John Copley, the Son
of Liberty sits as though he’s musing
on independence, patriotic chin
in portly hand: he’s the American
dream. The historical home, with his spoons,
his Windsor chairs, the sad tale of his dead
wife, his live wife, his sixteen children, tells
the whole domestic story in four dark
rooms. It’s a small house for the busy smith:
pounding and etching and polishing, now
engraving a scene on copper: redcoats
gunning down innocent, unarmed local
citizens! The Freedom Trail’s crimson line
runs through the streets, the mall, toward the Old North
church, passing a make-shift memorial:
hundreds of blank dogtags dangling from walls
of strung wire. But where is Paul Revere? He
is above it all, grimacing earthward
from his pedestal, astride his bronze steed,
shouting at air—oh, his one-if-by-land,
two-if-by-sea, his British-are-coming,
who doesn’t want to believe it? Look how
fabled he is, how lyric, hair whipping
back, horse beneath him always already
in flight, the one hand flung out as he calls
on all insurgents to wake up and fight.
3. Mount Vernon
Begin again: at the dining room door
and through into the dark: the plaster sheaves
and rakes decorating the walls, marble
fireplace, the river outside the essence
of freedom within limits. And from here
the great general husbanded his fields
and his widow with her many slaves, her
daughters. Hard to forget, since you must start
there, the servants’ quarters, though “larger than
many planters’ homes,” the maids, the butlers,
though the porch provides a bucolic view
from which the members of the Mount Vernon
Ladies Association might have sighed—
a slight descent in the various grounds,
the silky, winding river—and dreamed of
his clacking teeth (which were certainly not
made of wood), oh his many gentle ways.
And then there were, of course, the people he
liberated, but only in his will.
Begin again: the visitor center
models the home as a dignitaries’
hotel and notes that the plantation grew
from two to eight thousand acres under
our founding father’s governing hand. How
he insisted on the good country life,
spreading the word of independence! And
here is the very bedroom where he died
of a throat infection, light and airy
and facing the water. The refusal
to tell a lie comes back, where our reading
began: the Delaware. His commanding
rejection of a crown, right at the start.
No wonder you go around it again:
you’ve been herded through. The idea remains
though: the house as a center, a notion
of order. But out, beyond the fence, lie
how many unmarked graves—nobody knows.
And Martha mourned in a clean white room marked
out by her on the upper floor and died
under waving, patient fans. She freed no
one, and the whole place then went to ruin,
opposing walls watching themselves fall. So
begin again. It’s a restoration.
It’s all laid out. It’s almost perfected.