by Norman Dubie
John Law is eating hot purple beets
in the poor house
in a dark corner of Alsace-Lorraine
where the lamps weaken
while he suffers a vision of complexity,
of paper money falling
upon rats
swimming in the long canal
of next winter’s early rains.
John Law is a membrane
of least fact—the idea of paper money
is Chinese, just
as animal crackers are Sumerian and puke
to most dogs
is a late least fact of appetite
all over again—
it is strange
that the financing of the American Revolution
and John Law’s printing machines
led to the bankruptcy
of the entire French nation
and hundreds, perhaps thousands,
of headless aristocrats
as if money were a kind of contingency
like rain.