Not a question like, Shall we gather at the river? but a statement
traveling in two directions
at once. A Man, a Plan, a Canal, Panama,
for instance, which speaks of the human river forged
through the wasp-waisted isthmus
of Central America as the U.S. grew weary
of the 19th century. By August 1914, a third of its workers
(yellow fever, bone-break, malaria)
are dead, the last shift punching out, handing
its trenching tools to the new shift punching in because
in faraway Sarajevo, Archduke Ferdinand’s limousine
is stuck, has taken the wrong turn, cannot
back up, and Gavrilo Princip levels his pistol
at the sitting Duke and Duchess and shoots them
dead. The canal, east to west and west to east is,
either way you look at it,
a win-win: your rare gold for my rare spices, my rare nuts
for your big pruning shears. A palindrome,
is a running back, say the Greeks, resembling its cousin
nostalgia—a longing to run back—as if you’d awakened
as did, magnificently, so Milton tells us, our “grandparents,”
in a loud and too-bright country far from home.
Madam, I’m Adam, says the one, and she says back to him,
Eve, and you know right away
that they’re made for each other. Their interwoven eyebeams
are the one bridge back and forth
to safety, the two of them so soon banished (a clock
has started ticking) beneath a flaming sword,
forever (though still, says Milton, hand in hand).
Their eyebeams are not the beams
their great, great, great grandson (seventy-six times great, says Luke)
insists that we remove from our own eyes
lest we dwell
too long upon the speck that mars another’s, and who,
from every passing moment, peers far
into the future, and far
into the past, and who, at every passing moment, steps once
and always down onto the disturbed waters
rising at his feet, and whose elders, some thirty begots back,
will wake weeping by a river
in faraway Babylon. Every backward glance is a salt
rubbed into the wound: Sodomites, Iraqis,
Palestinians, Poles, Cherokees, Syrians,
Sudanese, Guatemalans, Nigerians, Ukrainians.... No one,
not even the banishers, is immune.
Able was I ere I saw Elba, says Napoleon
plotting his return, and this to-and-fro, out-and-back
motion say the Greeks, is boustrophedonic:
a farmer’s turn of ox and plow
down one row and up the next, a winding serpent
of a field unearthed in the hectares behind them, a configuration
the Greeks will etch into their stone and ink onto their scrolls
so that even now, we might move our heads
from side to side, combing the texts, checking for loopholes, searching
and searching and searching, back and back
and back, parsing and parsing, kicking
the chariot wheels, back and back past Odysseus
stuffing his ears, back past his joy
at the puppy Argos jumping at his feet, back till
there you are again, unlatching someone’s hand again:
Look both ways before you cross, and you will,
a little light-headed now, stepping down
into the crowded boat that sets out soon in one direction
