River of Memory
Like the ancient Greek’s Eridanus, the twisting blue path Aquarius streamed across a mythic sky, the river hisses past me. There is no ferry. Like the archaic Anasazi’s San Juan, green wanderer in the desert, legendary canyon meanderer, the river slips away from me. There is no ferry. Like the coal barons’ Monongahela of my childhood, brown lord of commerce, brimming with barges and tug boats, the river bounds beyond me. There is no ferry. I arrive expecting to depart, but find only the abandoned landings of stars, of sand, of dreams. I have no white desire to dive in and swim to the far side of history.
“Old Ferry Dock” & “Pier Marker” by E. A. Hanninen, 2009
I reach the river but there is no ferry.
2009 Everglades National Park Artist-in-Residence, Karla Linn Merrifield, has had poetry appear in publications such as CALYX, Earth‟s Daughters, Poetica, The Kerf, Negative Capability, Paper Street and Blueline (print zines), and in The Centrifugal Eye, Terrain.org, Elsewhere: A Journal of the Literature of Place, and Elegant Thorn Review (online zines), as well as in many anthologies. In 2006, she edited THE DIRE ELEGIES: 59 Poets on Endangered Species of North America, from FootHills Publishing; in 2007, FootHills issued her Godwit: Poems of Canada, and will issue The Etowah River Psalms in September. She is also author of Dawn of Migration and Other Audubon Dreams (2007, RochesterInk Publications). Karla is a regular contributor to The Centrifugal Eye. Contact Karla (klmerrifield@yahoo.com)