Well, the next poem is a narrative poem, it's a story.
And it's a historical fantasy which
takes place in October 1859 in what
is now the State of West Virginia,
but was then Virginia.
And I'm just going to tell you a little bit about what
happens in it to sort of help you listen.
In this poem, a young white woman leaving home
intersects by accident with the abolitionist base
of John Brown at Harpers Ferry.
And John Brown's plan was to raid the federal arsenal
at Harpers Ferry and arm the slaves for a slave uprising,
the Afro-American slaves.
At the end of the poem, there is a brief appearance
by the great black anti-slavery activist and strategist,
Harriet Tubman, who was known to the people as General Moses.
Now, in fact, Harriet Tubman never came to Harpers Ferry.
She and John Brown were in contact.
She felt that the raid was going to be
made at a very inopportune time and she severed connections
with him before it.
But so her appearance in the poem is a fiction.
And the rest of the poem is a fiction, or as I say,
a historical fantasy, but it happens in history.
Harpers Ferry.
Where do I get this landscape?
Two river roads glittering at each other's
throats, the Virginia mountains fading across the gorge,
the October shortened sun, the wooden town,
rebellion sprouting encampments in the hills,
and a white girl running away from home,
who will have to see it all.
But where do I get this?
How do I know how the light quails
from the trembling waters?
Autumn goes to ash from ridge to ridge.
How behind the gunmetal pines, the guns are piled.
The sun drops and the watch fires burn.
I know the men's faces tremble like smoky crevices in a cave
where candle stumps have been stuck on ledges by fugitives.
The men are dark and sometimes pale
like her, their eyes parched or blank or squinting, all by now
are queer outside and out of bounds
and have no membership in any brotherhood.
But this where power is handed from the ones who
can get it to the ones who have been refused.
It's a simple act to steal guns and hand them
to the slaves, who would have thought it?
Running away from home is slower than her quick feet thought.
And this is not the vague and lowering north ghost
land of deeper snows than she has ever pictured.
But this is one exact and definite place,
a wooden village at the junction of two rivers,
two trestle bridges, hinged and splayed, low houses crawling up
the mountains.
Suppose she slashes her leg on a slash pine's tooth?
Ties the leg in a kerchief.
Knocks on the door of a house.
The first on the edge of town.
Has to beg water.
Won't tell her family name, afraid someone
will know her family face.
Lies with her throbbing leg on the vined veranda,
where the woman of the house wanted her out of there.
That was clear, yet with a stern and courteous patience leaned
above her with cold tea, water from the sweetest spring,
mint from the same source and later with rags
wrung from a boiling kettle and studying staring eyes,
eyes ringed with watching.
A peach tree shedding yellowy leaves and a house
full of men who keep off.
So great a family of men and then this woman
who wanted her gone yet stayed by her, watched over her.
But this girl is expert in overhearing.
And one word leaps off the window panes
like the crack of dawn, the translation
of the bubble of two rivers.
What does this girl with her little family
quarrel know about arsenals?
Everything she knows is wrapped up in her leg
without which she won't get past Virginia, though she's
running north.
Whatever gave the girl the idea you could run away
from a family quarrel, displace yourself
when nothing else would change.
It wasn't books.
It was half overheard, a wisp of talk, scape, flight, free soil,
softening past her shoulder.
She has never dreamed of arsenals,
though she's a good rifle shot, taken at 10 by her brothers
hunting.
And though they've climbed her over and over,
leaving their wet clots in her sheets on her new
started maiden hair, she has never reached for a gun
to hold them off, for guns are the language
of the strong to the weak.
How many squirrels have crashed between her sights?
What vertebrae crack did her fingers signal?
What wings staggered through the bowels whose eyes ringed
and treed has she eyed as prey?
There is a strategy of mass flight, a strategy of arming,
questions of how, of when, of where.
The arguments soak through the walls
of the house full of men, where running
from home the white girl lies in her trouble.
There are things overheard and things unworded, never sung
or pictured, things that happen silently.
As the peach trees galactic blossoms open in mist,
the frost star hangs in the stubble.
The decanter of moonlight pours its mournless liquid down
steadily on the solstice fields.
The cotton swells in its bowl and you feel yourself engorged,
unnamable.
You yourself feel encased and picked open,
you feel yourself unenvisaged.
There is no quarrel possible in this silence.
You stop yourself listening for a word that will not be spoken,
listening instead to the overheard fragments phrases
melting on air, no more, many thousands go.
And you know they are leaving as fast as they can.
You whose child's eye followed each face wondering not how
could they leave, but when.
You knew they would leave, and so could
you, but not with them.
You were not their child, they had their own children.
You could leave the house where you
were daughter, sister, prey, picked open
and left to silence.
You could leave alone.
This would be my scenario, of course,
that the white girl understands what I understand and more,
that the leg torn in flight had not betrayed her,
had brought her to another point of struggle,
that when she takes her place she is clear in mind
and her anger true with the training of her hand and eye,
her leg cured on the porch of history ready for more
than solitary defiance.
But when the General passes through in her blazing head
rag, this girl knows her for Moses,
pleads to stand with the others in the shortened light,
accepts the scrutiny, the still black gaze,
but Moses passes and has gone to her business elsewhere leaving
the men to theirs, the girl to her own.
But who would she take as leader?
Would she fade into the woods?
Will she die in an indefensible position, a miscarried raid?
Does she lose the family face at last?
Pressed into a gully above two rivers,
does Shenandoah or Potomac carry her north or south?
Will she wake in the mining camps to stoke the stoves
and sleep at night with her rifle blue and loyal
under her hand?
Does she ever forget how they left?
How they taught her, leaving?