25 October 2026

By Philip Kuepper

I set out, mentally, from my Iowa
hometown, fast by the Mississippi,
and row the river. I row south
through Mark Twain country.
I pass Huck and Jim on their raft.
I row south through Welty,
and Williams country,
where I saw the petrified man
just emerging from a beauty parlor,
and catch the Desire streetcar.
I row Louisiana, and into the gulf’s
waters of Mexico,
row round south of Miami,
and out onto the Atlantic,
where I row past all manner
of seafarers, on the crowded
nautical highways of history:
Pytheas of Massilia, Hanno the Navigator,
Dias, Magellan, Drake,
Leif Ericsson, Columbus,
Cabot, the Pilgrims,
then all the way to the Pacific,
where Melville’s Pequod appears a phantom
out of fiction and into this poem,
followed on by the merchant,
no, not of Venice,
but ships built at Mystic,
in the 19th Century. I row
the waters of the centuries
to the present, the waters a clock
that keeps its own time,
time out of time that flows
into the waters of Infinity.

(17 October 2026)