To Kylan, for showing me content
have you heard the river;
cry as a babe for the pacifier
motherland, with a mossy
hand webbed in politics, in
dirty laundry on a colonial square
drying in spectacle at first
town's fair. there perched
on an old man's nose, the hearth
of the people, then cast
from the iron nostril,
a trail of sparks to wander
down bayou, waltz across plain,
samba in desert, the people
strewn from a hen's womb
and replanted in the fertile placenta
of Venus, foreign cuckoo to
this river motherland.
in the flats walked those shoes
of mud, between memories in
wood flotilla of father Atlantis,
beyond west wind city mother
loose and rich,
as a goose hunting gold rush.
this garden of Venus, a womb
of windows to a spirit's memoir
bottle bouncing, by side of a canoe
down the river, carrying produce
of a life's toils bunched
in the loins of infertile hardships,
with one chance to win
best steer at show, promptly redressed
and left home, renamed the city
Commerce,
to make the resume “pop”.
a substantial failure
these Romans, in modeling
lucid Greeks. Carthage came
by hand of midwife prairie
and gut of ghost-town cellar,
plucking nighttime laurel dreams
left overhead, through Commerce's
spirit catcher slave, now retired
in spiritual reservation genocide.
the river now cried lonesome;
a mother with no bearing,
surging back north as a heart
capitulating in identity a century
before the pacemaker was conceived,
leaving a son with no soul to drink,
no captain to guide his hand's harvest,
season lost to season with no vision of god.
yet came a shepherd to the lonely pasture,
fed the flock as a cuckoo takes
in all broods by borrowing
a log cabin free of rent, this
new world saint parted the river
like butter churned, a feat as the
first anniversary in a hundred years,
praising the next coming, Nauvoo.
so the city remains, but so a rake
plowed the young goslings,
skin from bone, not a feather
was used for a pillow or meat for supper,
but a symbol in moral acceptance
as a diaspora hung from a noose
like a Christ on a wall. so
the people of the river and Nauvoo
filtered down a drain, a lesson
in tears trailing the contours of a face.
