Northwest Passage
The portage, as I remember,
was long and not the last, and treacherous,
the Shoshone woman perhaps to be trusted
to guide them through hostile territory,
perhaps not. And when they came at length to nothing
but swamp, there was nothing to be done but wade in,
flintlock and powder held over their heads,
Lewis and Clark going first,
up to their armpits in the oozing Technicolor,
the drive-in movie burning like the visions
the nuns at school told us the saints saw,
burning in the desert.
And then I too slipped deeply
into sleep, a sated visionary,
because next we were driving home
past the mouth of the Yakima River,
the farthest up the Columbia Lewis and Clark went
before they turned back, making their way finally
to what they'd come for--open water.
Or so a sign we passed always claimed,
our one scrap of history.
I tasted the word like the host at Communion,
without the teeth, as the nuns had instructed,
until it dissolved into nothing.
Tonight someone else's father stood on the corner
in his shirtsleeves in the halo of streelight,
waiting for the bus to take him deep in the desert:
it was time for graveyard shift at the reactor.
The moon was a canoe tipped over in the river,
the river heavy, warmed by coolant from the reactor.
Along the shore you found the pearly husks
Of salmon, eyes wide, swimming with cloud.
Down to the Sea of the West, Lewis wrote,
along the banks, out over the water,
the tribes had built platforms to fish from,
so many they were almost continuous.
"And did you eat fish from the river
more than once a week when you were a child?"
the doctor will ask, but not for years yet,
not for years.
Psyche and Eros in Florida
In the subtropics it must be spring:
a flock of cedar waxwings
swarms the cabbage palm.
It clings to its shadow. They whisper.
They devour the fruit no local bird wants.
Unswerving, they swerve through clotheslines.
Let their whispery cries be mine.
Their whisper of wings is yours.
But what good is sight?
In the dark, I thought, lay the struggle
of mind over body that kept Aquinas awake.
Whoever you were, you slept on.
By candlelight nothing is not beautiful.
The relief of your finely sculpted head.
The drop of wax that fell on your bare shoulder.
Why didn't you want me to see you?
The drop of red on each wing almost glows
this hour neither dark nor light.
Waxwings, forgive me. Fly away north.
What was the dark like?
I remember the mind fogged with something not dream.
And afterwards
what of the traitorous, languorous body?
It lies down. It begs.
Much Too Late
"Much too late," I said on the steps
of Santa Maria Maggiore, meaning it wasn't a ruin,
we could find something older and take each other's picture.
But you insisted and then we were inside,
the dim tonnage polished to a hush,
the guidebook proving you right;
not the apse built with the rubble of pagan Rome,
not the sliver of the Holy Infant's crib in silver,
the porphyry urn of early martyr's bones,
but the ceiling. It rated a star in your book.
There was the first gold Columbus brought back
with the first slaves from the New World
to prove he was as good as his word.
The Queen gave it to the Pope to prove she was good.
On high, the papal coat of arms bristled with gilt,
the keys to the kingdom of heaven forever crossed,
flanked by plastered, impossible flowers.
High on the wall a mosaic flickered like faith:
a dreamer who'd hung around the courts
of the great all his life, which is to say
Moses, the man in the plainest robe,
still stretched out his rocky hand
to part a rocky patch of sea,
sure he'd been chosen by God,
sure the promised land showed up in a later panel--
though it never did, only the scouts sent ahead
to search for it, lost in the surrounding gold.
Thirty days and thirty nights in the desert
that was the ocean--too late for Columbus
to order the ships to turn back,
too late for him not to believe he was sent.
The ships hung it the eye of the wind,
the scent of dirt carried over the salt.
Much too late, we two Americans,
and this the wrong god to ask forgiveness of.