Border River

Look up this river in the book of rivers.
Its reaches chatter with the tongues of centuries,
its searched for titles staked with imperial names.
Its never being fully found was all the reasons
written in the tides of chance that swept its borders.
For both countries, bleeding from the same heart,
singing a song of waters tossed by history,
found their own flag, strung from the beating halyard,
unfurled in a neighbour’s eye by the hand of faith,
bound by the wonder of wind, with love for signal.

For beneath the stratum of Benjamin Church’s
corpulent boast,
blowing the islands over with the gaff of Falstaff,
(with cutlass arabesqued in empty Acadian air)
lies the body of Champlain embalmed in a
casque of praise,
proclaimed as the ghost of a stone museum of
spectral affections,
trapped in centennial fever by federal continents,
and heaped with the blessings of millions of
priestly fingers,
thumbed in the books and learned by rote forever.
Yet if a cairn were put upon his bosom’s sward
it could teach the mummers something for a day of
international mourning,
marking the count of time, to point a finger
at the sign-manual of the common dream,
lost by men whose counsels failed, who wrecked
the common structure of their Father’s house.
Here in the horn of Passamaquoddy the waters
come brimming about the chronicled shores of
the island
with living oceans of uncreatejdo y
that hands could seize and quicken together and
hold forever.