My feelings about Mount Rushmore are best captured in four objects: a poem, a playlist, a video, and a set of images.

POEM

Rushmore

Massive without moving, leaving me unmoved
How can I take you seriously when your
Opportunist
Sculptor erected a Stone cold Mountain to
Confederacy just a few years before?
Hired and fired by Daughters, if not the
Klan

Granite tears falling from your mountain in a
Cascade crush the forest under a heap of
Rubble
Left like a scar for all to see while eating
Bison stew or ice cream, ambling from and to
Garages, the other splendid monument
Here

Perhaps you are best seen as hugely absurd
Clung to by other icons, the Hitchcock Blondes,
Park
Rangers, retirees, Americans, who
Stop to pay and park and gawk and shop, like we
Do, beneath Teddy’s surprisingly gentle
Gaze

PLAYLIST

Sean’s playlist for approaching Mount Rushmore through the Black Hills:

Home on the Range (Cherokee Edition), Tori Amos
The Star-Spangled Banner, Whitney Houston (Super Bowl XXV)
The Star-Spangled Banner, Beyoncé (Second Inaugural of President Barack Obama)
Simple Gifts, traditional
This Land is Your Land, Pete Seeger
Overture to North By Northwest, Bernard Herrmann

VIDEO

Video: Sean M. Santos

IMAGES