ryan harPer aiDs to navigation I.

A green nun reflecting off starboard a pale sun— the fog is lifting, the channel widening. As we do each time the waters open, we wonder abaft and inland.

At confluences the work was hard but clear: we built our tow above Defiance, twenty boats to one, leaping cargo, catching between the gaps visions of the Ohio trembling like a snake pit—long, lank, and brown—in the white-hot dawn, swinging cables over timber heads, the pawl crackling as the winch spun. So, we gathered our giant to itself.

The idle tug snarled impossibly to life— the force to flip an empire, sweetly mortal. We sent off our continent down the Mississippi the span of all goods. We prayed to pray well.

There are runs where the lead marks align but variously. The corps undid the oxbows long ago. Deadly bends, the moil of old stories: blue cat big as jon boats, dark economies, a stow of goods to slip like crushed pills into the channel.

We have sought invention, received double: easier going these days, the ligature of the old errand-ways undone, we square the shoulders of the giant, shoot the middle, resolute unto the mean. But there are runs where the old marks remain, rusty, inviolate in the bluffs and bittersweet hickory wattle, impossible for exegetes of finished passage to pass unglossed. There, the danger: the alert, exchange of notice for notice. We the bodies reading go to at half-throttle, diamond, and balls lashed at masthead. We pray to believe the sounding call of the dead in chorus with the living known, praying before they resolve into meanings that destroy each the other.

A green nun reflecting off starboard, pale early morning: our nocturnes fly slowly away into day. Between wake and sleep, The channel widens; at last, our load we feel as loss, drawing us down.

Weeping for the young masters, their chroniclers drowned, we turn to the fading moon: praying a stay, for ourselves, our origins, the best in tow— Mississippi—madrigal—relief.

The law of change, the darkness of the river parting, turns on our hope. There are lead marks aligning. Real bodies running the entire course— some beyond the cloud of memory, some telling in decay—we the corps in the channel, slide under deep mist, our giant passing to the gulf unseen.