Читать книгу Americas: Selected Verse and Vignette - A. Robert Lee - Страница 16
ОглавлениеMississippi Headwaters
Those trickles
those gurgles
like Nature clearing its throat
and bound for Lake Itasca.
Border water
Canada dry
America wet
10,000 Lakes says every sign
woods of fir and cedar
Minnesota of sky-pond
and brown-green-arboretum.
We’d got there
up from twin-citied Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Dakotas to the west.
Wisconsin to the east.
Manitoba to the north.
Bemidji overnight.
White Earth daytime.
Vizenor family headstones
shadow of the 1862 Dakota War
and link-up with
wholly present-day
Anishinaabe Harold Goodsky
“Sorry can’t stay…
got a golf appointment,”
as he explained
how often he was taken for
the Norwegian Harold Gudski.
But then there was always Longfellow’s Hiawatha
not to say The Hiawatha Line in Minneapolis --
so how do you like your “Indians”?
Like spring water rises
literary memory
Rolvaage’s Earth Giants
Lewis’s Main Streets
Fitzgerald’s James J. Hill
Dylan’s Zimmerman family
Keillor’s Wobegon
Gilliam’s imagination.
Like spring water rises
Anishinaabe big river
Misi-ziibi, gichi-zibi
France’s Messipi
Spain’s Río Misisipí
America’s Mississippi.
Like spring water rises
Melville’s “father of a great multitude of water”
Dickens’s “enormous ditch”
Twain’s “big still river”
Langston Hughes’ “blues river”
Faulkner’s “luminous” Yoknapatawpha river.
Like spring water rises
each foreign atlas naming
through a ten-some of all-America states.
Minnesota Hastings
Wisconsin Genoa
Iowa Guttenberg
Illinois Cairo
Missouri New Madrid
Kentucky Columbus
Tennessee Memphis
Louisiana Venice and New Orleans
its clearwater to saltwater swell
into the Gulf of Mexico
as the city sings
Sachmo’s “Boy From New Orleans”
Fats Waller’s “Walking to New Orleans”
Johnny Cash’s “Big River”
Dr. John’s “Sweet Home New Orleans”
John Lee Hooker’s “Going to Louisiana.”
Like spring water rises
all from drips
amid grass drops
amid leaf leaks.
Like spring water
rises the
amniotic
birth
fluids
of
America’s
great
necessary
tree
and
sky
trade
and
slave
word
and
song
artery
river-run.
