Monongahela
Looking back now, forty years gone,
my lack of curiosity about the river
I lived with daily disappoints me.
Maybe that’s the way of youth,
to be fixated on origins and ends –
things far off, the cold mountain spring,
the distant sea, not the everyday.
The river itself, a slow brown ox,
harnessed to the yoke of industry,
was as common as my neighbors
and as of as little interest.
I carried with me in those days the hard stone of contempt
that the young may bear for the familiar to mask their fear and uncertainty.
From the bluffs above Lock and Dam #2
I watched the tugs push their coal barges downriver,
imagined the days and nights of their long journeys,
past Pittsburgh, down the Ohio to the soft-banked Mississippi,
past all the towns with their wonderful sounding names --
Gallipolis, Oceola, Tallulah --
Dreamed of the bayous and ocean --
rank climbing life --
ibises and spoonbills amongst cypress swamps --
and the hot green cities –
Baton Rouge, New Orleans --
copper-haired women, skin sheened with sweat,
and the sharp clean wail of a saxophone
calling down heaven.