We, Arriving

We arrive
and re-arrive
Columbuses and Roger Williamses
and are still strangers in this forest

We were given a gourd,
a corn stalk
aquidneck island
and the cliff walk,
fashioned cameos
of our sweethearts
with silver from Toledo
and gold hauled from the Comstock

Main street echoes with the
minuteman’s musket,
Horseshoe clip clopping,
beating of the tell-tale heart…
the panhandler’s plastic bucket
backward glances of the cherokee
the trail of tears, and the ride of Paul Revere
We are living between the rhythm of the
Creak splash
Creak splash
Creak splash
The cry of the herring gull
And the foreign stirrings
of countless starlings.

We sit with friends
imagining first footsteps
on plymouth rock
And as we sit, we imagine again
new footfalls, free of Baptist sin,
Free of western guilt
Free of native grief

Carefully laid bricks buckle and split
an uneasy nostalgic skin
protects our tender modern foot
from the rugged glacial till
the disintegrating hill, the river silt
and the thirsty honey locust root.

Last night’s rainfall
has trickled through the herringbone
Last year’s fortune
has slipped through the cracks of the old stone bank
but depressions in the granite
accommodate the puddles,
recycled particles
of fickle water,
perhaps the same molecules
that swallowed the burning decks
of the Gaspee as it sank.

We walk on
bluestone
And the bedrock below,
breathing the remaining emanations
of thirteen million trees
replaced
by thirteen colonies.
The river finds us brimming with hope
in an increasingly anaerobic America
we amble by monuments to the countless dead
stand on concrete banks, as the fish die hemmed
and we hold our breath
because the Narragansett and the Chesapeake are our lungs
and the menhaden are our hemoglobin.

Politically reawakened
by the spirit of biracialism
multiracialism
post-racialism
we-are-one-people-ism
but unemployed
and pulsing with the blood
of the Narragansett
the Taino
the Visigoth
and Nahua
the Quechua
the Pequot
and the anglo-saxon.

The daylighted waters
meet a city burning bonfires of togetherness
and populated by longing.
we hear the rushing water
and ask the orange embers-
Will we launch paper boats
on the Woonasquatucket
And dip canoe paddles in
the clear Moshassuck?
will we grow with the oak?
will we inhabit the stone?
Or will the patchwork of streets that glittered
In the eyes of city planners and smiths
manufacturers and metal workers
lead us ever forward
into the confines of our own polished homes?

What is the prospect of a dirty city?
a river contained and tamed
since the hurricane of ’38
Slammed headlong into the land’s face
How will we claim
this Rockwell defaced, refaced, misplaced
a homeless man on fire in space,
a handful of plastic arrows ,
an acid rain bleached bouquet of laurels ,
a freedom-seeking missile,
Are these our symbols?

My New England foothills majesty,
my soaring eagle scavenger,
ever forward we move without foresight
seeking penance and revenge
simultaneously, escaping
from the hatred that shot Lincoln with a derringer
Burying memories to a twenty gun salute,
the other in our boot,
holding a canteen full of pride,
so we leave, the pioneers,
bound for California.

And the oceans are met on all coasts
the water runs from earth to sky,
from the aquifer to the factory
and mostly to the mouth of the city,
sheeting down benevolent and college street
down the throats of our beleaguered rivers.
The walls of glen canyon watch
as their creator trickles through concrete and rebar.
We are seabirds that fight over a transparent fish,
pecked apart by an American wish,
what will we say to our children
that for too long
we tested our mother’s patience,
that we could not imagine a different place
where coyotes and crows
oaks and maples
pulsed with the same energy as the homo sapiens
that we perished, strangers still,
feeling lost inside a nation?