River Road: a Mississippiad

What began as vast waves of fire
flows inexorably
toward ice. A river beginning
in tall grasses, headwaters
part northern mist, beyond
stoic ancestors, the journey-work
of time. A short beeline down the flyway
to fading storefront facades, the corseted
embrace of lock-and-dam.
Bleach bottles, plastic lawn chairs, effluent
of the disposable bobbing to shore. So you say
history is only a story
of things.
With folded hands, Madame Cecile
foretells. Princess Shoshanna in her twangy
TV voice decries. Pop celebrities of spirit
joined to commerce, partisans of bile with
a show of their own, they entertain the mornings
at our motels.
Ghost winds, muffled
pileus clouds from the melting ice cap
seven hundred miles away. Tamarack headlands
in Paul Bunyan country. Towering roadside statues
of Babe, the Blue Ox. Life in large print.
A boy with one leg crops his father’s farm.
The courthouse soldier’s scattered child.
His baler and twelve cows above the hill
and silo. Bales round as Etruscan columns
grazing angled hillsides. You think
this world is for knowing one afternoon
at a time. And even then everyone
will tell a different story.
At La Crosse a first
encounter with the broad river, onset
of black clouds. A mood. Moods.
We turn more self-conscious.
I touch your hair, finger your earrings.
Follow the silver sliver of a jet
toward sunset.
We take bridges at Red Wing
and Prairie du Chien. Country roads to nowhere
we had ever been, some brushed by
the beautiful, poisonous and bitter.
Our fingers and palms anodized
by dewberries in sunburnt fields. At riverbank
mudfish and canoe sidle, slip and twist by
beneath the flyway’s excesses, the frenzied
frequencies of low, imped wings. We watch
a robin’s mosey, hop, bounce and tug. It swivels
to watch us.
How cordial of Fort Madison
and Keokuk to anticipate
Dubuque. Weathered plywood up to the dentils.
The graffiti-laced lyrics. Failure to survive
photogenic. Where is the camera
to catch these neglected Roman arguments?
An architecture never quite persuasive
in a country of the plain.
Crowded spaces abandoned to
open places. Tires, cans, bottles, things
from the American bounty.
A yellow
Caterpillar stalks the edge of Main Street.
Dozer blade ravenous. You suspect at once
Bunyan, Babe and Hels Helsen
have had a hand in this. Over the river
a long, low plume of the nuke plant. Visible
sigh of a nation
accumulating silences
of exhaustion. The undertaker has moved to
Bettendorf. No embalmer needed for death
by attenuation. Death by fire.
By degree and irony. Only death by nodding.
The saloon sandbagged. Everything went in ’93.
Again in ’11. Broken levee. Faith breached.
The past
is backlit here. A moon from over water arcs
across tower and steeple—bells sold.
The stained glass and marble removed to
franchised pizza parlors. One last time
you look back. Toward home.
Birds singing on the branches. Their elegies
fishtailing along nerves through moist river air.
Toward local lessons of the public square
once schooled in late pagan virtue. Until
America’s Arcadia morphed into slave lands.
Numbered lashes of an overseer’s whip.
A garden early on
going up in toxic weeds.
In the river towns
tap tap of the blind man’s cane
shuffling behind tomorrow’s shadows.
This my patch. Always is the same.
Nothing new. History like calamity.
Always be.
Event mirrors revelation
where Nauvoo rises on a bluff above the Mississippi.
Riverbanks of winter nahoo and scrub oak
obscure craft shops, the tidy houses.
Houses of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young.
A great steepled temple rising on the hill
like a statehouse. America raised with Israel
in the sacred annals to exception. There will be
a new set of books. And a lynch mob will murder
prophet and patriarch. A militia berserk
with guns rechannel history. The national faith
now forged.
Accounts of the lost prophet
growing to heroic legend, and foretelling
refuge in the West. Stories now grown remote
from their hard beginnings.
Oxen, mule carts and wagon trains
will cross the February river. Passable
that year over ice. Handcarts pushed
and pulled through a continent’s long winter
for fifteen hundred miles, a Via Dolorosa.
Graves of perished saints on their way to Zion
lie scattered trailside.

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