The Rhine

Reconstruct the picture of what it may have looked like.

    Of what you may have looked like standing there.

The sun moving around the spires,     stiff, compass-like.

The river traffic stopped. The tolls collected

by whatever state controls this segment of the river—

    Begin at the source: a glacier in the eastern Alps.

Travel to where the earth is flat enough again for everything to end in sea.

Call it what it is. As if you, like the others, were an emigrant

from your life. A canopied boat is cutting through it, blue and passionate,

and you are caught by the usual desires

like an epoch in its hot final year: coronets of European flowers. Lichen embedded in a world in which everything is mortal.

Like you the river has three names.

Rhein in German. Rhine in French. Rijn in Dutch. Your father’s father. Your mother’s father. Whatever ancestor it was

that kept the courtyard: he must have been

vigilant, must have been watchful,

tending to the plants,

raking gravel over dust.