for
Susan Rogers
the ship all the hard-
won inches of her
to be a
boat
a boat from someone’s
hands uprisen,
low-gunwaled,
prompt to the water,
swift,
a
wherry
she calls it, one woman
can scull this thing along
I call a ship
because it leaps
along the river soon,
soon, she hopes, so many
hours hundreded away
to knit this wood together
to be a boat.
Her ark
against the dangerous
mainland,
where
we abide
bound by gravity
full of fear about that lucid
luminous water all
round us, all we have left
of the first America,
before we did to the land
whatever she flees from
into the beauty
that is always moving,
that touches everything it passes,
waits now for the slim
vessel that will know it well,
this hand-made animal she weaves.
