Literary Corner: The Size of Texas, the Surprise of Death

From the president's press conference, San Antonio, Wednesday, 10 April, reported by Seahorse at GardenWeb, a remarkable pair of sonnets taking a long walk through his current preoccupations, the need for a wall, the fact that Texas is larger than the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which Central Americans don't realize, and the unexpected relationship between walking and death:

Two Border Sonnets

by Donald J. Trump

I. A Vast State

If we had the wall, the good people
will not be able — you’ll see them on the other
side of the wall. Number one, they won’t
come, because they’ll see there’s no way
of getting through. Right now they think there’s a
way to get through. And the people back home
never hear about that, they start to walk.
They tell them Houston’s half a mile away,

but it’s 300 miles. It’s desert. This
is a vast state, it’s a vast area. You look
at it, the state’s tremendous. I come from
New York. You have Fifth Avenue and that connects you
to Park Avenue, it's not too far away,
but this is hundreds of miles between places.

Late 17th-century print of an etching, ca. 1520, by Daniel Hopfer of Augsburg, Death and the Devil Surprise Two Women, from the collections of the Victoria and Albert, London.

II. What Surprised Me

They’re very expensive fences, but they don’t
want to go through the process of going through
the fences, so, again, they wait until
the fence is open, the gate is open. They wait
at the gate and they kill people. They want
to take the truck, a lot of times they don’t even
want to go to the house, they want to steal
the truck. So you always go to the gate in doubles.

It’s been going on for many years, it’s coming up,
I’m bringing it out. And these people are coming
into our country, some are dying during the walk.
Many of those people I’ll bet are very good people,
but some are dying during the walk. Many,
many have died. That is what surprised me.

Upon which Dana Perino, hosting the event on Fox News, apparently hastily cut away: "Okay, you’ve been watching the president down there in Texas, doing something I think is smart."

"Good people" seems to refer to asylum applicants, a euphemism to ward off harm, in the way English peasants used to refer superstitiously to fairies as "the good folk". It's funny to think of them trekkking a thousand miles through Mexico from south to north and then being shocked to find Houston on the other side of the wall is farther away than Park Avenue is from Trump Tower. Or that they're all bent on getting to Houston, as if they'd been inspired on their journey by the essays of Joel Kotkin.

But the almost giddy lightheartedness of the first poem gives way in the second to an increasingly dark sense of dread, of people ("good people"?) who won't go through fences no matter how expensive they are, an opening gate where killers and truck thieves lurk, a house they don't want to go to, death going on for years, walking, death, the surprise of death. He's in a very peculiar frame of mind, and as has happened occasionally before, we see a gradual slippage away from recognizable reality, where the haunting imagery stops referring to anything we know.