Culture
by Robert Pinsky

Bewildered, bewildering primate. Absinthe. Circumcision. Couplets.
Grudges, beliefs. The war of my childhood, Europe tearing at itself.

Scarification. Conceptual art. Classic celebrated scholarly papers
On the Trobriand Islanders, more fiction or poetry than science.

Absorbed or transmitted always invisibly now invisibly in the air
From a digital Cloud. Visible and invisible in the funny papers.

Images, music. In the comic-strip family the snob Maggie's hair
Rose up curly as the treble clef that embraces the musical G.

Her pugnosed husband Jiggs, stocky as the bass clef, hair in two red
Tufts near his ears over the wing collar Maggie made him wear.

He wanted to sneak out of their mansion to "corned beef and cabbage"
At Dinty's—how could a mystified child guess it was code for beer?

In Africa I drank sweet palm wine ladled from a red vinyl bucket.
The animist Sangomo who spoke with Ancestors was also a Christian.

In the tune, I was drinking beer in a cabaret, Oh was I having fun! But
Pistol-Packin' Mama caught me there—and now I'm on the run.

The Web says the song was a hit by Al Dexter the year I was born.
Bewildered, mystified, I recognized it. Ginsberg recognized Time.

Different explanations of Hutu and Tutsi, are they peoples or races
Or tribes or constructions out of the thin air of Rwandan history?

Music of bold stereotypes: Irish sweepstakes Jiggs, "nouveau riche."
Hillbilly stereotype in a cabaret, the forbidding Mamas, objects of fear.

Charlie Chan, Life with Luigi, The Goldbergs, Amos'n'Andy. Japanese
Detective Mr. Moto played by the Jew Peter Lorre, who fled the Nazis.

Der Stürmer, lynchings, rapes, internment camps. Eliot's vicious book
Of lectures on Culture, delivered in Virginia, that he chose to suppress.

Virginia, Florida. The Dakotas. California, word with no known origin.
A young singer unconsciously voicing the sound of Auto-Tune software.

After Pearl Harbor a movie sidekick changed overnight from Japanese
To Filipino. Arts. Quotas, migrations, genocides. Near Beer. Beauty.

Maggie and Jiggs had a beautiful daughter, Nora. Virginal. The strip
Was beautifully drawn, the artist George McManus inspired he said by Art

Nouveau—and here he is photographed in costume as Jiggs, it was all a
Self-portrait: Oh lay that pistol down, Babe, a personal craving to survive.