Two poems about looking at the same two rivers

Dominion

by Eleanor Lerman

We spent the night in Maryland, in an old house with stonr floors

and stairs as steep as a bookcase

An October landscape crouched outside the windows: bent

trees, low hills

Witch country,I told you. No, you said, there were no witches

in the slave states

That didn’t help. I went to sleep and dreamt about a woman

who had something in her eye

She was given an operation, and when she woke up, she was dead

(This really was my dream.) I feel funny, she said to the nurses,

but they wouldn’t name the problem

Ha ha, you said, when I related this in the morning. You really have

been watching too much TV

Then we drove on to Washington. A gray day in the capitol,

though that hadn’t stopped the crowds

Schoolchildren were touring the FBI building, nuns were lunching

at the CIA

The Freedom of Information Act, I decided, had changed everything:

the spooks, the sergeants

were all quick to grant us access: These are your museums, they

pointed out

These are your files (Like every other mild paranoid my age,

I believe I have a file

though I’m sure it’s pretty flimsy. Someone like Patty Hearst,

on the other hand,

probably has one a mile wide.) There are still lots of secrets

in these buidings, you remind me

And I believe that. There are secrets everywhere. Secrets in us

Later, I wanted to see a famous building with walls converging

in a famous point

that everyone has to touch, including me. It’s like rubbing

the backbone of a beast, folding your hand along the spine

of a sleeping world

Don’t do it, you warned me, though I had said I would

for weeks

It will only make you feel crazy. And you were right:

for hours

I felt as if I had a soul, and that soul had mingled with

a million ghosts,

a million handprints of the touring public. I tell you and

I tell you, you sighed, but you never listen

All over the world, in every language, someone is saying that

to someone else right now

Later, we drove on to Harper’s Ferry. Sunlight made a

dramatic entrance in the afternoon,

dropping thin golden shafts between still-threatening clouds

We parked the car and crossed a footbridge that led back

a hundred years,

past flood markers and plaques commemorating John

Brown’s raids

On a steep street, in a shop that had been built before

the Civil War

I stopped to buy a button from a soldier’s uniform, lingering

for a long time over my choice:

blue, because they saved the Union, or gray because

you have to sympathize with tragedy?

In the end, of course, I bought them both. You bought

a map of the Chesapeake and sat on a stone wall

eating ice cream,

planning the rest of our trip. I walked on, climbing

a path to the Maryland Heights

and up there on the cliffs, buffeted by winds, by death,

history, dreams, war, and information

I wondered, Over what do I have dominion? Don’t think

that even now I have a clue

though it was a reasonable question to ask in a place where

I could see the convergence of two great rivers

but no further south, over the curve of the earth, to wherever

they were going

Earthly Love II

I have burdened you with the trust
of decoding my silence. All summer
I had stories of things I didn’t want to say.
When memories move in suddenly,
unexpectedly, you tire in their
refragmentation of the present.
You are too aware how this moment
may later crowd the simple act of being
somewhere else.

As if spending days
counting series of lasts were not enough, my father
listened to a speech from his childhood. He remembered
thinking German tanks might troop down his street
and take him away. He stares as he listens,
lonely like it is the P.A. system in his
elementary school. Like it is so many things.

This is always what’s at stake.
What to do if it comes and wondering what to do
when it does. I’ll tell you about the handgun I’m
afraid my father will use because he has seen
tumors become the size of a small universe.
I’m not asking for your interpretation to be mine—
even when death makes us want to name something
we can always need.

But the silence wedged in between
our small comments about what we see—
even when memory is busy labeling two unrelated things
the same. The blank look across the same river.
The nothing in your hand,
this means everything.