style="font-size:15px;"> We followed the river
to City Park,
where it came to a sudden,
majestic boil—
collapsing over
the Third Street dam.
Fascinating,
the patterns in
those webs of foam;
endless the stumps
of trees, the hat,
and shattered door
that whirled in the water,
rose in a rush,
and were sucked back in.
The undertow
enchanted them.
But we forged onward,
south, south,
to the edge of town,
to the gravel pits
and mudflats where
flamboyant and sad
under yellow maples
we saw the houses
of pink and gold.
They looked like stamps
someone had stuck
in an album, once;
they looked like flags
from somewhere far—
and hot, and poor—
left out in the rain
till the colors ran.
Black Lab
And it so happens
that ink darkens the page, the mind of the dreamer
flows, and the snowy yard grows dense
suddenly with unexpected animals,
with lost dogs, with shoes and footprints, tatters
of old tunes and the wail of sirens
that sounded thirty years ago. Where
have they kept themselves, so long? And why
are the dogs still puppies, the slide trombones
in the band that plays in the public park
still shiny, although the audience
has wilted and turned white? And why, when
the black Labrador comes and licks your hand,
this rush of happiness? Good dog. Nothing
is more mysterious than the way things are.
In the Shallows
Still, as the spiral grew, He left the past year’s dwelling for the new.
The river, wider here,
held fossils in the shallows.
These were the famous corals—
Silurian, Devonian—
that Agassiz had gathered.
He made a special trip
from Cambridge to our county
after the Civil War.
The sun beat like a hammer
on huge, silent mudflats:
the Iowa River Valley
of eighteen sixty-eight.
And it was hot. He sweated,
the aging professor—
the tick, tick of his hammer
echoing off the bluffs—
but when the sun had set
six pallets had been loaded
to take back to Harvard:
fine specimens of coral,
some dozen massive sponges,
and one perfect ammonite:
a gift for Holmes, the poet
of the chambered nautilus.
Nearly a century later,
the sun beat like a hammer.
On gray limestone covered
by scratchy, gray-green lichen,
my white, hairless body
felt almost translucent—
ribcage, backbone, scapula—
in the relentless sun,
and sometimes I’d imagine
the companionable echo
of my hammer’s tick, tick
was my colleague, Dr. Agassiz—
or that my hammer was
a delayed echo of his:
that I would be like him,
distinguished, bearded, tall.
But it was Time’s own hammer
that was beating down tick, tick
on the whole river valley.
It was Time my hammer echoed
on the gray rock formations
as I chipped away another
brachiopod or mollusk,
and another, and one more.
