Every spring, the drive
from the interiors:
Eastern whites cut off
and floating
toward the head of tide—
the rigging of empire—
hires aligning
the trunks to glide through
the deep runs,
making for great works
and the wide boom.
It’s hard to be native
and useful; hard to be
neither. In contestable
land (the injury
of inheritance,
with inheritance)
how much can ride on
the turned prodigal—
who would track
the Penobscot back,
marking the dark
hemlock, the quaking
aspen, the red
pine, the pointed pitch
of contact—contact
plodding up the sea-run,
a basic inward drive—
who would vacate
the myth of ages, false flags
Acadia, Norumbega
Eastern whites at the dawnland
gate—who would haul
a thwarted craft across
the muddy carries,
achieve in gnomic passage
the fuller closeness
of admitted distance?
Every spring, the drive:
all float down here, for fear,
from the interior,
it is late for great works.
Ryan Harper
Ryan Harper is a visiting assistant professor in Colby College’s Department of Religious Studies. He is the author of The Gaithers and Southern Gospel: Homecoming in the Twenty First Century (University Press of Mississippi, 2017) and My Beloved Had a Vineyard, winner of the 2017 Prize Americana in poetry (Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2018). His poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Spire, Killing the Buddha, Spoon River Poetry Review, LETTERS, Jelly Bucket, Cimarron Review, Chattahoochee Review, and elsewhere.
