Roger Mitchell

To The People of Upper Black Eddy
         eddy: a current running counter to the main current

Whoever you might have been back when
it was decided the bend in the river
was enough. Water curls in on itself,
blackened by the upper canopy of branches
or muck scraped from the sodden sediments
and slopes that dampen the Delaware.
A counter current to the larger, more
insistent, thrust. Many must have passed, pulled
along the towpath the makings of a life,
where now a small twist of tar humps over roots
in the roadway between houses clawed
to the hillside and those wedged up against
a defunct canal. Those who now live there wait,
arrange small bits along the river’s edge,
a thought or two, something accrued,
sweepings time draws across one’s estuary.
How good to be among the residues
and trailing weeds. I stopped to ask the way
to Tinicum in Frenchtown. They thought I meant
New Hope, and so by misdirection,
found an inside edge instead, a selvage,
this catch in the swallowing we swim in.


A Train at Night

I pick a seat on the waterside, a window
onto what will only be strings of scattered lights
across the river, little shoreline shacks with docks
or up on the bluffs or the set-back slopes, small squares
of white from the picture windows of the fifties.

The river whispers to itself nearby,
invisible, moving in a hundred layers
on its single persistent widening downward
trestle to the harbor and the seaward currents
and the scavenging winds like those I sometimes hear

above the house in the broken spruces and pines,
snapping branches, a clacking like mating gannets,
trees that have been there longer than people, those
who thought living under the ridge or above it
might be the right place to assemble their bones.

I love the lives of other people, and when asked
if the seat next to me is vacant, say, of course,
but dive down into the river of argument,
stream of narrative I’m in, wondering, if this
might be enough books to have pored over for clues

to the silence. I sneak a look at the book
my neighbor has hauled out of his pack. At his face, too.
I can’t read either. One of the bright fingerlings
swarming toward the world. I sit silently beside
him and his open book, looking at the window.

In it, my face shadowed, a few sleeping bodies
across the aisle, a glint of light on the river,
the mountains I don’t need to see to know they’re there.
Remote presences lean away from us, lure us
with silence and distance, closed as an unread book.

The conductors doze between stops now, the last stop,
its rows of wooden houses and high-backed shops flush
to the walkways, named for the river it sits by.
Three people get off under orange light and walk
separately up the hill and into the dark.

Twenty minutes away from the last station,
and the engineer, nearly delirious, lays
long wails of the horn trailing over the valley,
though somebody’s driving a car alongside us.
An escort maybe, a pilot ship, a guide.

We slide like a boa into the station, each
lugging something, themselves, as though in a mineshaft,
up a steep set of stairs to the cars and, for me,
a long drive into the mountains, the towns peeling
away till the road is mine and a new day slips

past the old one, past the sleeping hamlets and farms.
The snow by the side of the road still where it was
yesterday morning, though someone is spending the night
up on the side of Giant, the car parked by the road,
for a morning scramble to the top to greet the sun.


The Chinese Have Landed

Seventeen below this morning, the moon
over Esther flat and artfully blotched.
We never see the other side of it.
The elongated downcast bearded man
across the aisle stares at, possibly through,
his knees. The woman beside him looks sideways
at her device. She, too, can’t watch TV.
I sit under it so as not to see it.
A woman in a wheelchair, pushed in
by her son, is whisked away at once. Not
to wait in a waiting room arouses
speculations, though no one speculates.
The garble of laughter and comment does
the thinking for us, piped in from somewhere.
Surely, the weather, when they get to it,
will be local, and what’s more, bearable.
Meantime, we have the picture on the wall,
the ceiling tiles, the strange dismal fabric
of the surgically matched furniture.
Across the room, even facing the TV,
the son has dropped his head. Let him sleep.
The glittering efficient inner rooms
await us. The masked proficiency
of everything near the end. The nurses
with homes and mortgages, even tattoos,
hand us off to others like bags of sand
against a rising river, holding back
the tide, or when the bell rings, easing us
down into it. The sun is out there shining.
The Chinese have landed on the moon’s back side.
I can’t wait to hear what it’s like there,
when for the first time light of a new kind,
ours, will shine where light never has.


About the Author

Roger Mitchell is the author of thirteen books of poetry, most recently As Water Moves. His new and selected poems, Lemon Peeled the Moment Before, was published by Ausable Press in 2008. It won the Adirondack Center for Writing's "Readers' Choice Award" the following year. The University of Akron Press published his two previous books, Half/Mask, in 2007 and Delicate Bait, which Charles Simic chose for the Akron Prize, in 2003. Prior to that, he published two books at The Figures, Braid in 1997 and Savage Baggage in 2001. Mitchell spent the largest part of his working life at Indiana University and for a time held its Ruth Lilly Chair of Poetry. Other recognition for his writing includes the Midland Poetry Award, the John Ben Snow Award for Clear Pond, a work of non-fiction, two fellowships each from the Indiana Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts, and other awards. Currently, he is writing a biography of the poet, Jean Garrigue. He and his wife, the fiction writer, Dorian Gossy, live in Jay, New York.

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