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American Visa

Are you now, have you ever been, a nudist?

Hardly the question I had in mind

at 1965 Grosvenor Square London

visa-seeking for The New Republic.

Self-fantasy had me the trouble-maker,

the commie, the un-American,

youth politico CIA/FBI target.

Why, surely, those

debutant Tribune reviews in the shadow of

Orwell and Foot?

Why, surely, those slivers of student Left-ism,

a war-march or two,

a smidgeon of Marx or Trotsky?

But a nudist?

For all my dubious Ban the Bomb shouts

or half-believed Clause 4 English politics

or America the Bad clatter

or Vietnam as chancre attitude

or VOTE LABOUR, Holy Loch, and End The War placards

or just as equally

my secret sharer

attraction to

the America of

Kennedy Camelot hope

Ginsberg and Dylan lyric

Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane

Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch

Manhattan and San Francisco

King Civil Rights and Malcolm Black Power

LBJ and Voter bills,

did it all just come down to

nakedness?

OK, you’re all set

in all-American

signature phrase

said the wholly pleasant

case officer.

Set to go, stamped passport visa, enjoy your stay.

Scholar resident

like a hundred arriving others.

Euston Square to Times Square

for sure.

This new Londoner’s theatre-curtain of importance

duly lowered,

on and into high Atlantic

treading the

Queen Elizabeth

Southampton

to New York time

and Fulbright America.

Was my best banner

simply to have kept my clothes on,

kept my pink-Brit flesh wrapped?

Had I saved America

or myself,

or the both of us

from exposure?