Drowning in Disorders
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPRoger Williams's Shipwreck Letter to the Citizens of Providence Colony, 1652
Five times to your one I have crossed that ocean,
citizens, in little more than wormy buckets
fitted out with sails, four of those voyages
in the service of this our colony—hat in hand
whilst seeking in London the patents and protectors
for our endeavor—and discovered full well
each time how the sea will become the sea until
without fail it ceases to be a revel, and yet
returning here, setting foot on this soil,
I am each time met with what it pains me
to designate the common shipwreck of mankind,
yourselves inspiring such gales and blackenings
as no mere ocean could thrash from itself
or support, nor any ship navigate to a peaceable
haven. I speak of this Rhode Island drowning
in disorders of our own creation, tumults
blowing from all the compass points,
each man sailing without a sheet anchor
under the seething wind of his own argument,
division following breach following distraction
as wave follows upon the heels of wave.
Litigations, rumored alliances with the Dutch,
papers of contention, island versus mainland,
and self-appointed commission versus
covetous council. Traduction, denunciations
piled one upon another as the tide piles
in broken billows, the civilities of town meeting
reduced to fragments like a shallop dashed
against rocks. Citizens, we have willingly bypassed
the fair wind of a unanimous spirit, and are like [End Page 87]
a ship's master tacking and dodging
in a great fog whilst each crewman, claiming
freedom of conscience as a license to select
whatever course best suits his own advancement,
ignores the common weal and woe which binds him
to shipmates and passengers, hauling aloft
or furling whatever foresail or mizzensail he will,
deaf to the master's cries, this as the passengers
refuse to pay their fares, and the forecastle
mutinies against the hold even as all hope
by some blindly benevolent fortune to arrive
safely in harbor. Do you take my metaphor? Look
around. For here on land you will see the shipwreck
sponsored by such policy. Your hogs straying
through your neighbors' gardens, bridges
in disrepair unto collapse for want of adequate
payment of just levies; and, for want of a ready
militia, our colony under the measure of
land-greedy eyes at Boston and Plymouth,
and of threatenings to the west,
lurking upon the moment of sunset.
Domestic Arrangement
The jays seemed to work from nine to five
and break for an hour around noon,
both of them bringing snippets
of last year's bean runners, dried catbriar,
fragments of rootlet and bine,
which she worried into shape as though
weaving a beard for that pine trunk
twenty feet from this window. When
the nestlings broke into this world,
skinheads, pink omnivorous yawps,
their father stood guard. Not fondly,
I'd surmise from his barbed head, but not
shrieking either, on a branch he'd [End Page 88]
otherwise issue threats from. The way
he sat in on the nest for her looked like
rudimentary parenthood—as if they could
turn and live the way we do. He held her
in his regard so you'd think he saw
bark scale and sky and moss tuning
themselves to her jay blues. Berserkers,
she wasn't long kept from spearing
a foreign egg clutch, and he'd rip away
at some little flower of carnage pinned
with his feet. One day the empty nest
looked not quite like absolute zero, but ratty
and somehow Whitmanian, as though
the good gray poet himself had invented
this whole arrangement, then hung
his beard in the tree and gone home.
Elegy for a Border Collie
As though they'd turned you into a cake
or an Easter bonnet, the box they handed me
was white, with a silver ribbon, and heavier
than it looked, and lit a red
scribble of rage in the air before my eyes.I wanted to set it on the counter and begin...
