© Copyright by POINT, 1995
Last modified 6/9/95
Poetry Editor
Naming the Dead
Androscoggin
Mississippi
Combahee
Penobscot
Edisto
Ashepoo
Named to assuage our guilt
In this country,
wherever we walk
we must tiptoe over graves
of the vanquished
who lie beneath us
in a continuous spin of sleep,
while we try to forget
the worst things we have done.
But these rivers are omnipotent.
They bloom and cry like newborns.
We cannot live without them.
Yellow bones of butterflies,
holy red maple in seed,
fingernails, and feathers
float for centuries
until they settle
on the riverbottom's
cemetery of sediment.
The cries of the dead
rise like air bubbles.
Listen to the words
exploding in the wind
as it flails its arms
across the surface of the water.
The rivers cannot keep silent.
Blue is the color of rain
falling in the night,
and brown is the river
that swallows rain.
Where the sun is
drowning in green
tea tinted water,
there are colors
giving birth in the rain.
Where the earth opens her mouth to the universe
Three black rivers unfurling their convoluted tongues
Ashepoo-Combahee-Edisto
Courbet's "l'origine du monde"
Unseen waters flowing to and from the womb
For Kendrick Mayes
The house of wind and brightly painted birds
sharpens its rooftop in the nightstream,
like a baby's tooth, pushed
into warm droughts swirling in the mouth.
Rooms are slowly filling
with alligator skulls
and wood smoke. On shelves
lined with bowls of butterflies,
pearl buttons, shining
chunks of Danish amber,
books, masks, and manmade angels,
strings of owl eyelashes
feather under glass.
In a box
that should be holding
jewels, the enormous yellow
teeth of bears wait for someone
to pick them up and think
about the mouth which held them
with blueberries and trout skeletons,
the tongue that tasted water
melting on mountains so distant
we can only imagine them here
on these salted flooding plains
where swallowing such water
would alter our lives
like a conscious baptism.
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© Copyright by POINT, 1995
Last modified 6/9/95