Spirits Distilled

Rivers Between Us

14 Rivers Between Us for Gwendolyn Brooks “. . . almost secretly, I had always felt that to be black was good.” She intended this as entendre, layered As mythology you and I should find Authentic, fictitious, something along the lines of writing The complexity of whiteness, How it’s empty, omnipotent, and always there Rushing to cover its nakedness. I saw it again last weekend At Harper’s Ferry when a young man stood and shouted, “John Brown was a goddamn traitor!” His voice as convinced as wounded Gray, His fingers webbed shut against his palms, And his eyes staring for the first time Into a photograph never taken, a landscape still detonating Up through his gut after one hundred and forty years. He takes a handkerchief from his right rear pocket And sweat disappears, dissolving into thirteen folded stars Stuffed neatly back inside faded denim. “Wish he was still around, I’d hang him my damn self,” he says, and from top of the Blue Ridge With sun singing down, I could have sworn I saw five hazy ghosts The color of a thousand carved muskets—but I was wrong It was a blur of Confederate soldiers Descending in blackface, cakewalking, and yelling something As I stood there staring 15 At the sight of it all—straddling centuries like wreckage, One foot in the Potomac and the other the Shenandoah. That’s when her words circled back Up through those waters, and again I felt some sense Of voices, what they must have been like When first she donned that haunting laurel— Jagged curses of whispers rising From all corners and hallowed streets. Driving home with the scene behind me, I kept hearing Somehow to find a still spot in the noise Was the frayed inner want, the winding, the frayed hope And once more I knew what I had known for years: Allegiance flows twice, at times, or not at all, As if the compass once carried can no longer be read. Utterances of smoke still detected in the distance, but you’re not sure How they got there, who’s leading the charge, fanning the flames. ...