Monument to the '91 Mill Fire

  "Blessed are they who see beautiful things 
in humble places where other people see nothing."
			~ Camille Pissarro

A six-story electric guitar juts out over the water
by the Stone Arch Bridge.  Vines twist up 
through the strings to a ten-foot-wide lion's head, 
in full roar.  Disco balls hang, distorting light,
from the chrome tuning pegs.  At the base, 
on a thin strip of river island, a grove 
of sugar-maples winds down the Mississippi.		
There, in the shadow of the Mill City Museum,
a ghost of a tour guide whispers about the night 
Bren Torgerson quit med school and ran 
to the river.  The night of the fire, he climbed 
to the Mill's abandoned roof, soaked
in the river's indifferent gaze, slapped Zeppelin 
into his walkman, and lit a Marlboro
between his teeth.  Seizing the air above 
his left shoulder and the unseen strings 
by his belt, Bren ripped an air guitar solo  
for the ages.  Stairway to Heaven ignited
from the kinetic energy in his fingers, from
his pure dismissal of social burden, from 
the Zippo at his feet-ignited the mill
which melted around Bren as he burned 
through his five-alarm swan song, standing
firm, blazing on the wooden stage, 
the flames flicking out 
across his River Styx, the glowing Mississippi.

Where the river comes to confess

"Chutes de Saint-Antoine"
dedicated by Father Hennepin

In the greater hour of a lesser tide,
there is a humility about man
that cannot be taught or falsified,
even when arriving at the breach 
of your expectations.

This is how a river leaves you;
feeling distance from the refrain,
seeing you as you were before,
seeing you as you have never been.

Where the river falls,
prayer is as veiled as sin.
For all that the river reflects
will be its mask.

The Unrequited River

Nicolet Island

She did not love him, so he came upstream
where light was scant and current not so strong, 
and built the headrace of mills that fell silent 
long ago. She did not see the river 
made tributary to itself, nor hear 
the rage of winter-melt released on lime- 
stone cataracts, and was the better for it. 

He timbered the land, milled the trunks and burned
the remainders for meager warmth. The ash
he cast downstream, love notes writ in murky
clouds, a script beyond her ken to know or 
his to speak aloud. 

Go to her now, the falls are saying, strengthen
with the river. And by the end perhaps 
deserve her, though she would not be the one
you once loved, and you would never again
be the one who loved her. 

On the Mississippi River Flats

Scant grass stands lean among last autumn's
cottonwood leaves.  I take off my shoes.
The leathery leaves and under-sand warm
my bare feet.  I follow Wordsworth a few
pages into The Prelude, then doze
under my straw hat, the book splayed open
on my stomach.  Waking, I raise myself
on sandy elbows to squint out at the river.

A rancid smell on the wind ... Out in
the channel, twenty or thirty yards,
something long and bloated churns the water.
One of the city's unwanted homeless,
dead man doing his face-down crawl?  What looks
like a burnt neck sinks down in the brownish
foam.  Then the current heaves it closer,
and I see that the "body," with its billowy
shirt of river water, is merely some
unidentifiable lumber castoff...

The young cottonwoods' leaves have begun
in earnest their green semaphoring, sensitive
to breezes other leaves don't register.
Full of their annual enthusiasm,
they have come to the only earth they'll know.
There's hardly a place on these river flats
not strewn with garbage or otherwise
contaminated by the same pollutants
that make the river unswimmable.
The Mississippi, born in primal clarity,
has no choice but to assume our wasteful
burden.  So does our own stream become swollen
and corrupted, distorting the shining,
clear idea we perhaps once were.

Here, the River Haunt

Washington Avenue Bridge

Bodies of students young despair:
An artist, the whispered, teeth and hair.
Some spectral digits clasp at flags and tear.
The wave and pavement witness near
This campus of dreams, the shade and clear
To see the windy seas our forms are from, our eerie erring ear

That unwise winding butcher Time would cease and pare.

Walking Pike Island

We move separately through sheets of snow
gathering in the field that lies between two rivers,
the Mississippi and the Minnesota.

Begun in mildness, the snow slows us
and you ask, should we turn back, but I want to go on,
want to reach the point of confluence.

We follow the shoreline, the river quicksilver against snow
and bark. We veer slightly, arrive suddenly at the point.
Pike called this a natural site for a fortress,

but the Dakota called it “center of the earth.”
I think it is a marrying ground, joining water
and land, river and river, where things come together.

If we were getting married again, I would choose this spot.
Your people would walk the Mississippi side
and my people the Minnesota side

and we would make confluence at this site.
But we are already married, so we stomp our feet and bow
to the waters flowing together.

World War I Monument, East River Road

I have a beacon for you
boys dreaming in Flanders
shades of the Argonne Forest, Belleau Wood.
A pillar by the river haunting,
stone flower cross on water-carved rock.
No one alive remembers you.
Banged by shells, rattled by artillery
your parents facing the black days...
Has the river quieted?
Has the muddy time it churned
run gleaming again? Past and present wed...
And you and I both living, and both dead. 

Autumn Falls

Hidden Falls shows her diamonds
The way somewhere an old bell sounds
Like autumn, but born again

Down the Mississippi

St. Paul

Down the Mississippi barges flow
Their lights pulsating, a deep red glow.
Tripping to the jazzy beat of a be-bop note
Nearby my girl sways in her black fur coat
Humming along in my ear, hushed and low.

Tell me we loved once, a while ago
We touched, felt the softness of fallen snow.
I left for war; our love was set afloat
Down the Mississippi.

Our years are turning, quiet and slow
But this much I'll always know
Long as I might for an antidote
Against time who comes like a swift clipping boat
Down the Mississippi.

River Cop

St. Paul River Caves

The other police didn't know what to do with his large hands and deep angers, 
so they gave him a boat and the river to patrol, uncharted territory, 
nude swimmers, drunken boaters, rope swings to cut down every night.
They weren't prepared for his zeal or for the parade of nude boys, 
each day's catch shivering in blankets because he hid their clothes.
My mother had to take the bus down to the station to claim my brothers.

The Mississippi cut its way through the sandstone cliffs, wild bottoms 
of old St. Paul. The river cop's boat was a moving target as he chugged 
up and downriver waving his gun and threatening to shoot dogs, 
swimmers and  hunters—down every day to check their traps.
From the shelter of the river caves my brothers and their friends threw 
rocks and bottles at the boat. When they saw the river cop who couldn't swim, 
floundering in water they rescued him.

One summer night Bill and Tom dragged a small civil war cannon from an attic 
to the Frankenstein caves below Otto Street. They loaded it with metal nuts and bolts. Soon the hollow clang
of metal hitting the river cop's boat echoed down the river chamber, 
shook the glasses in West Seventh Street bars.
Sirens filled the streets, but the police would never follow kids into caves 
where in the dark with the bats they toasted a new street legend.

This was the late fifties. The boys who would die in Vietnam 
broke out of tiny yards. They never named the violence 
that cut thick, murky and sweet as the river through their street lives.