3 March 2024

By Philip Kuepper

I come from Mississippi River country.
South of Iowa, my home state.
came Twain, came Eliot,
Jim, and J. Alfred.
Jim, too, would have had
the legs of his pants rolled up,
to keep them from getting wet on the raft.
I, myself, wear shorts.
(In their time, were shorts even a thought?)
But, returning to the raft
of the river, raft of the city
of literature, writers need
a platform on which to float
their ideas, J. Alfred rowing his
through the flood of urban sprawl,
Jim, his,
on the scaly back of a river.
Jim wrote Mark,
J. Alfred, Tom,
they the writers of the writers.
As for my own boyhood,
I knew flood. I knew drought,
a river, overflowing, a river so low,
tugs and their barges had to learn
a host of new languages
from mouth to source, source to mouth.
Where I come from, even waste land is soil rich,
and frogs sing a cappella,
more often than they jump.
The literature of place wrote me in my youth.
It floated the raft of its identity
on the river of my blood.
The river, the immense silver river
gave me to the Thames, Seine, Mediterranean,
gave me to them so they could write me
on their water-marked pages.
I am a word given
to the world of water.
I am become the word boat.

(21 February 2024)