History
 
It turns out that the first white man in North America
wasn’t Columbus, it was a Viking from Kongsberg
who left his mark on a gravestone in Nova Scotia,
 
and that even he was preceded by a Basque from Santiago
who sailed here in 1184. It turns out the Aztecs made it
across the Atlantic in 500 B.C., landing in England
 
to worship Quetzalcoatl in the rain-shrouded moors
of Devon. It turns out things are different, surprising,
not like you thought; the Laplanders of Norway
 
were in North Dakota in the year 204, bringing with them
a gospel written in Sanskrit by Christ’s twin sister;
Zulu tribesmen voyaged to the North Pole long before
 
the last ice age, they brought with them abacuses and bells
made of stone, also small machines remarkably similar
to lasers. It turns out that the Declaration of Independence
 
was originally written in Celtic by Duke Ellington
and Mao Tse-Tung, then translated into English
by the druids of Mexico; the atlas shredded, usual wisdom
 
flummoxed, Muddy Waters is the secret author
of the Tao-Te Ching, Emily Dickinson the first translator
of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Boston Tea Party
 
started by Confucius, the assassination of Kennedy
accomplished by Merlyn, the hydrogen bomb invented
by the Mayans of Germany. And whose story is it
 
you’re going to believe, and what dream of fact is this
from which you have yet to awake, and where do you
come from O thread in history’s rug, O waterdrop
 
far from the sea, O man or woman kept and caught,
imprisoned in a story written by others, wandering
through someone else’s dream of the world?
                                                                             
                                                                      (from Miracle Atlas)