Rivers of Morning in America

 

Rivers of Morning in America

There was beauty in America and I found it.

Everything was free: the deer, the libraries, lunch.

It was a hitched ride with the fire chief, this free

and fine America, there sailor who gave me a ticket

for a Cessna flight up the coast at dawn

the rocks brimming out of the salt blue

like knuckles ruddy with victory-

and the Cessna bounced with every invisible

pothole, every clump of air we hit and the man

next to me read a book and below us

there were islands and mist spidering

like lifelines along the water, best suit blue.

This America a tiller in hand,

bearing away.

There were orchards, bears, rivers

of morning and dusk and rain

and pickups stopping to offer 

a lift as far as the fork in the road-

and there the tamarind-breasted 

warbler would peck at the night's harvest

of skittles junebugs, then the bright rain

and the dark black beauty of the woods.

I found beauty in America

where the daily boxscores told the tale 

of someone winning, and no one got shot

under the large American moon

that sang itself white in the April nights

as though it were made of light,

as though all lies were always

this pretty.

                                                           -Eva H.D., from her collection The Natural Hustle

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