grooved the Republic towards her. A spike hammered
into the heart of their country as the Sioux looked on.
The spike for the Union Pacific had entered
my heart without cheers for her far gentler weapon.
I could not believe it was over any more
than they did. Their stunned, anachronistic faces
moved through the crowd, or stood, with the same expression
that I saw in my own when I looked through the glass,
for a land that was lost, a woman who was gone.
III
The elegies of summer sighed in the marram,
to bending Virgilian reeds. Languid meadows
raised their natural fly-screens around the Parkin farm.
Larks arrowed from the goldenrod into soft doors
of enclosing thunderheads, and the rattled maize
threshed like breaking surf to Catherine Weldon’s ears.
Ripe grain alchemized the pheasant, the pelt of mice
nibbling the stalks was unctuous as the beaver’s,
but the sky was scribbled with the prophetic cries
of multiplying hawks. The grass by the rivers
shone silvery green whenever its nub of felt
was chafed between the thumb and finger of the wind;
rainbow trout leapt arching into canoes and filled
their bark bodies while a clear wake chuckled behind
the gliding hunter. An immensity of peace
across which the thunderheads rumbled like waggons,
to which the hawk held the rights, a rolling excess
from knoll and pasture concealed the wound of her son’s
death from a rusty nail. It returned the image
when the goldenrod quivered, from a golden past:
Flushed wings. A shot. Her husband hoisting a partridge,
still flapping, towards her. That summer did not last,
but time wasn’t treacherous. What would not remain
was not only the season but the tribes themselves,
as Indian summer raced the cloud-galloping plain,
when their dust would blow like maize from the furrowed shelves,
which the hawks prophesied to mice cowering in grain.
Chapter XXXV
I
“Somewhere over there,” said my guide, “the Trail of Tears
started.” I leant towards the crystalline creek. Pines
shaded it. Then I made myself hear the water’s
language around the rocks in its clear-running lines
and its small shelving falls with their eddies, “Choctaws,”
“Creeks,” “Choctaws,” and I thought of the Greek revival
carried past the names of towns with columned porches,
and how Greek it was, the necessary evil
of slavery, in the catalogue of Georgia’s
marble past, the Jeffersonian ideal in
plantations with its Hectors and Achilleses,
its foam in the dogwood’s spray, past towns named Helen,
Athens, Sparta, Troy. The slave shacks, the rolling peace
of the wave-rolling meadows, oak, pine, and pecan,
and a creek like this one. From the window I saw
the bundles of women moving in ragged bands
like those on the wharf, headed for Oklahoma;
then I saw Seven Seas, a rattle in his hands.
A huge thunderhead was unclenching its bruised fist
over the county. Shadows escaped through the pines
and the pecan groves and hounds were closing in fast
deep into Georgia, where history happens
to be the baying echoes of brutality,
and terror in the oaks along red country roads,
or the gibbet branches of a silk-cotton tree
from which Afolabes hung like bats. Hooded clouds
guarded the town squares with their calendar churches,
whose white, peaked belfries asserted that pastoral
of brooks with leisurely accents. On their verges,
like islands reflected on windscreens, Negro shacks
moved like a running wound, like the rusty anchor
that scabbed Philoctete’s shin, I imagined the backs
moving through the foam of pods, one arm for an oar,
one for the gunny sack. Brown streams tinkled in chains.
Bridges arched their spines. Led into their green pasture,
horses sagely grazed or galloped the plantations.
II
“Life is so fragile. It trembles like the aspens.
All its shadows are seasonal, including pain.
In drizzling dusk the rain enters the lindens
with its white lances, then lindens enclose the rain.
So that day isn’t far when they will say, ‘Indians
bowed under those branches, which tribe is not certain.’
Nor am I certain I lived. I breathed what the farm
exhaled. Its soils, its seasons. The swayed goldenrod,
the corn where summer hid me, pollen on my arm,
sweat tickling my armpits. The Plains were fierce as God
and wide as His mind. I enjoyed diminishing,
I exalted in insignificance after
the alleys of Boston, in the unfinishing
chores of the farm, alone. Once, from the barn’s rafter
a swift or a swallow shot out, taking with it
my son’s brown, whirring soul, and I knew that its aim
was heaven. More and more we learn to do without
those we still love. With my father it was the same.
The bounty of God pursued me over the Plains
of the Dakotas, the pheasants, the quick-volleyed
arrows of finches; smoke bound me to the Indians
from morning to sunset when I have watched its veiled
rising, because I am a widow, barbarous
and sun-cured in the face, I loved them ever since
I worked as a hand in Colonel Cody’s circus,
under a great canvas larger than all their tents,
when they were paid to ride round in howling circles,
with a dime for their glory, and boys screamed in fright
at the galloping braves. Now the aspens enclose
the lances of rain, and the wet leaves shake with light.”
III
From the fort another waltz drifted on the lake
past the pier’s paper lanterns, swayed by violins
in the brass-buttoned night. Catherine Weldon,
like Achille on the river, watched the worried lines
made by the boathouse lanterns. Then she heard a loon’s
wooden cry over black water. Lights draped the coigns
of the pierhead, then a scream as round as the moon’s
circled her scalp. The nausea stirring her loins
was not from war, but from the treachery that came after
war, the white peace of paper so ornately signed
that perhaps that sound was really the loon’s laughter
at treaties changing like clouds, their ink faded like wind.
Empires practised their abstract universals
of deceit: treaties signed with a wink of a pen’s
eye dipped in an inkhorn, but this was not Versailles
with painted cherubs, but on the Dakota Plains.
She had believed in the redemptions of History,
that the papers the Sioux had folded to their hearts
would be kept like God’s word, that each signatory,
after all that suffering, had blotted out their hates,
and that peace would break out as widely as the moon
through the black smoke of clouds that made the lake-water
shine stronger than the lanterns. Then she heard the loon,
no pain in the cry this time, but wooden laughter.
&n
bsp; The clouds turned blank pages, the book I was reading
was like Plunkett charting the Battle of the Saints.
The New World was wide enough for a new Eden
of various Adams. A smell of innocence
like that of the first heavy snow came off the page
as I inhaled the spine. She walked past the lanterns
where some bark canoes were moored to the landing stage,
then paused to look at the waltzers in their ghost dance,
then stood at the window clapping transparent hands.
When one grief afflicts us we choose a sharper grief
in hope that enormity will ease affliction,
so Catherine Weldon rose in high relief
through the thin page of a cloud, making a fiction
of my own loss. I was searching for characters,
and in her shawled voice I heard the snow that would be blown
when the wind covered the tracks of the Dakotas,
the Sioux, and the Crows; my sorrow had been replaced.
Like a swift over water, her pen’s shadow raced.
“I have found, in bleached grass, the miniature horror
of a crow’s skull. When dry corn rattles its bonnet,
does it mean the Blackfoot is preparing for war?
When the Crow sets his visage on Death, and round it
circles his eyes with moons, each one is a mirror
foretold by his palm. So, the bird’s skull in the grass
transfixed me, parting the spears of dry corn, just as
it would your blond soldiers. As for the herds that graze
through lance-high grasses, drifting with the Dakotas,
are not the Sioux as uncertain of paradise,
when the grass darkens, as your corn-headed soldiers?
Doubt isn’t the privilege of one complexion.
I look to the white church spire and often think,
Is the cross for them also? The resurrection
of their bodies? The snow and the blood that we drink
for our broken Word? Ask your wheat-headed soldiers.
The charm that rattles in the fists of the shamans
is a god, not a writhing snake, with its severed tail.
They believe a Great Wind will whirl them in its hands
by grasses that never die, springs that never fail,
that restore their souls like the clear-running Hebron.”
Lantern light shines through the skin of an army tent
where her shadow asked its question. Catherine Weldon,
in our final letter to the Indian agent.
Chapter XXXVI
I
Museums endure; but sic transit gloria
agitates the leaf-light on their concrete benches
in the sculpture garden, where frock-tailed sparrows are
tagging notes to a pediment while finches
debate on a classic façade. Art has surrendered
to History with its whiff of formaldehyde.
Over a glass-case a scholarly beard renders
a clouding judgement. The freckle-faced sun outside
mugs through a window, and so I retrieve my breath
from a varnished portrait, take back my irises
from glaring insomniac Caesar, for whom death
by marble resolved the conspirator’s crisis,
past immortal statues inviting me to die.
Out in fresh air, close to a Bayeux of ivy,
I smoked on the steps and read the calligraphy
of swallows. Behind me, reverential mourners
whispered like people in banks or terminal wards;
Art is immortal and weighs heavily on us,
and museums leave us at a loss for words.
Outside becomes a museum: its ornate frames
square off a dome, a few trees, a brace of sparrows;
till every view is a postcard signed by great names:
that sky Canaletto’s, that empty bench Van Gogh’s.
I ground out my butt and re-entered the dead air,
down the echoing marble with its waxed air
of a pharaonic feast. Then round a corridor
I caught the light on green water as salt and clear
as the island’s. Then I saw him. Achille! Bigger
than I remembered on the white sun-splintered deck
of the hot hull. Achille! My main man, my nigger!
circled by chain-sawing sharks; the ropes in his neck
turned his head towards Africa in The Gulf Stream,
which luffed him there, forever, between our island
and the coast of Guinea, fixed in the tribal dream,
in the light that entered another Homer’s hand,
its breeze lifting the canvas from the museum.
But those leprous columns thudding against the hull
where Achille rests on one elbow always circle
his craft and mine, it needs no redemptive white sail
from a sea whose rhythm swells like Herman Melville.
Heah’s Cap’n Melville on de whiteness ob de whale—
“Having for the imperial colour the same imperial hue …
giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe.”
Lawd, Lawd, Massa Melville, what could a nigger do
but go down dem steps in de dusk you done describe?
So I stood in the dusk between the Greek columns
of the museum touched by the declining sun
on the gilt of the State House dome, on Saint Gaudens’s
frieze of black soldiers darkening on the Common,
and felt myself melting in their dusk. My collar
turned up in a real freeze, I looked for a cab,
but cabs, like the fall, were a matter of colour,
and several passed, empty. In the back of one, Ahab
sat, trying to catch his whaler. I looped a shout
like a harpoon, like Queequeg, but the only spout
was a sculptured fountain’s. Sic transit taxi, sport.
Streetlights came on. The museum windows went out.
II
Passing the lamplit leaves I knew I was different
from them as our skins were different in an empire
that boasted about its hues, in a New England
that had raked the leaves of the tribes into one fire
on the lawn back of the carport, like dead almond
leaves on a beach, and I saw the alarmed pale look,
when I stepped out of a streetlight, that a woman
gave me at a bus-stop, straight out of Melville’s book;
then the consoling smile, like a shark’s, all the fear
that had widened between us was incurable,
as cold as the edge of autumn in the night air
whose leaves rustled the pages of Melville’s Bible.
III
White sanderlings scuttered towards the fraying net
of the evening surf, then panicked, just out of reach,
when a wave made another try, although it could not
exceed the limits set by the scalloping beach
where the birds were mirrored in slate, their shapes exact
and nervous, beaks darting, and then the wrinkling glass
disturbed their reflection. As I steadily walked
towards them, the clattering flock, to let me pass,
circled the tilted sea, and then it resettled,
wave, sand, and bird repeating their process, since they
had seen so many lovers joined by the hands, led
by the star that rises first from the darkening bay.
On the mud-marked seafront people took evening walks,
letting their dogs sniff the foam from a pewter surf,
gulls puffed their chests to the medalling sun on rocks
drying at low tide. Loosened kale heaved in the sough
of the lobster-yawls.
A dog kept barking, “Hough, hough!”
at the stiff horizon. Homer (first name Winslow)
made that white chapel stroke under the mackerel-shoaled
sky of Marblehead, reframed in the windscreens
of cars in the parking lot. Summer was bone-cold.
On the nibbling beach whipped by its wind-machines
the scarves lifted and rattled with a lifeguard’s flag,
and a knife that was edged with autumn pressed its blade
on my cheek, the wind sounded like a paper-bag
thwacked open, and the crunching sound my shoes made
on the concrete’s sand enraged me. Tears blurred my sight;
head lowered, I stopped. White shoes were blocking my path.
I looked up. My father stood in the white drill suit
of his eternal summer on another wharf.
He stood in cold mud watching the curled froth decline
round Marblehead. Gulls were turning in from the cold.
He put out his hand. The palm was as cold as mine.
I said: “This is hardly the place; maybe I called
but it’s too cold for talk; this happens to old men,
and I’m nearly there. You could have been my child,
and the more I live, the more our ages widen.”
“We could go to a warmer place.” My father smiled.
“Oh, not where you think, an island close to Eden.
But before you return, you must enter cities
that open like The World’s Classics, in which I dreamt
I saw my shadow on their flagstones, histories
that carried me over the bridge of self-contempt,
though I never stared in their rivers, great abbeys
soaring in net-webbed stone, when I felt diminished
even by a postcard. Those things I wrote to please
your mother and our friends, unrevised, unfinished,
in drawing-room concerts died in their own applause.
Way back in the days of the barber’s winding sheet,
I longed for those streets that History had made great,
but the island became my fortress and retreat,
in that circle of friends that I could dominate.
Dominate, Dominus. With His privilege,
I felt like the “I” that looks down on an island,
the way that a crested palm looks down from its ridge
on a harbour warmer than this one, or my hand.
But there is pride in cities, so remember this:
Once you have seen everything and gone everywhere,
cherish our island for its green simplicities,