By: Ryan Harper
Wedding of the Waters
Be on my side
before the water reddens—
butte-print intaglio,
earth diving and a hoarse wind
dodging through the canyon:
these are complex faults
at the gates of the hot city:
the runoff, Shoshoni northward
plaiting, the waters of life dual.
We are not the first
as such—we remember
the prints compiled,
overlaid in the bottoms,
in the gypsum bed,
trace their perilous paths:
Arapaho without relief,
latter-day formation,
benthic faith ending
in sight, taking new life—
two spirits in the exposed
land of the given names.
I’ll be on your side
in this the unknown country
when the depression turns void,
turns womb—out of the murder
landed, fluttering, scattering
black under the rainbow
stock of the reservoir—
there will be the American
Arnon, incising through the tells
of Beulah, where the gridded
western states are not
but seem the nation settled;
there will be two waters,
destroying symmetries,
depressed and wedded,
holding the ink.
North River, Hudson Beach
Some heavenly power guide us out of this fearful country!
Small craft advisory,
issued in white caps,
typically relevant
to the sounds and bays,
but this day the vessels
upriver contend
too with chop and cut flow.
Look west, Manhattan:
New Jersey crests, collects
condos and worn docks:
tidal wave in still life,
suspended, denied
even grim fulfillment.
Easy to believe
riverside—the last heave
of suburbs, nation
lurching eastward—our trash
is sourced on edges—
the continent’s hedges
tholed up in final
thickets and snarled assets,
frozen. Look again,
across the lifting ground:
fragile colony,
a shallow corridor
of shells, conventions
of finished men, monstrous
shapes plaque the greater
subtleties of the isle.
Easy to believe
a little craft only
need breach that sick swell,
a good pilot could punch
the billow to clean
country, long becoming:
tacking through the Palisades,
land as true as waking
in the real place; or
press the wave from below,
surface, Lazarus,
to the world-wide welcome.
Easy to believe
in good pilots, good routes:
Washington, Lincoln:
these are the conduits
we take when we think
of our true country, east
or west: stuff of dreams,
beyond the last white caps,
a sea-change—it seems
this generation might
believe harder things.
Still we want sharp notice:
be advised, who would
travel in a small craft:
only the best could
steer your vessel today;
only they would not.
Ryan Harper is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Colby College’s Department of Religious Studies. He is the author of The Gaithers and Southern Gospel: Homecoming in the Twenty First Century (University Press of Mississippi, 2017) and My Beloved Had a Vineyard, winner of the 2017 Prize Americana in poetry (Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2018). Some of his recent poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Tahoma Literary Review, Wild Roof Journal, River Heron Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, LETTERS, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere.
Wedding of the Waters
The literal “Wedding of the Waters” occurs near Thermopolis, Wyoming. What goes as the Wind River suddenly goes as the Bighorn River (or the reverse, depending on one’s direction). There is no fork, no converging or diverging channels—just a title change for the singular waterway, the monikers and the point of conversion agreed upon by…who knows? This poem is my reflection on real and imagined American confluences, and the power of naming as a way of mythologizing, erasing, improvising unity and difference.
North River, Hudson Beach
Manhattan island, where the river becomes the ocean (or the reverse), the island itself a many-masted ship, headed either upriver or out to sea, depending on where one locates the stern. Ever since I moved there, I have wrestled with whether it, like poetry, is a gateway into my country or a point of departure from it.