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I.	  The Settlement

          Hickory bark bluffs
          at the blend of two 
          rivers.
          Gasconade waters buttered
          with the muddy Missouri.

          A lookout of miles 
          kept in dawn’s trees
          by Afterbirth Boy in search
          for the Double-faced man **
          and his ships.

          He walked the deer tracks,
          the silent banks
          in whispering wisps of limbs
          and etched his hunting fishing fires
          in abrasive limestone.

          And when he ascended skyward ***
          appearing as a star,
          his careful pots and arrowheads 
          remained for field trips.

II.	  Sailor’s Grave

          Long gusts rustled 
          and turned the leaves.

          A riverboat 
          anchored offshore.

          Men shouldered the knotted box
          scaling rutted woodland slopes,
          disrupting the Prelude to the Afternoon
          of a Fawn.

          At the top of hill
          the hole was ready.

          A prayer
          by the captain.

          Words for dark earth’s 
          reception
          as River Princess,
          her screaming steam whistle
          echo bouncing limestone bluffs,
          haunted the breeze for miles.

          The same limestone 
          carved for a marker,
          placed out of deference
          to a memory,
          out of fear of powers unseen.

          Forrest of passing
          Took possession 
          of the passed away.

          The tombstone of faded
          relief proved unmovable
          in one terrible night’s torrent.

          But dead oak felled by
          by lightning’s lethal strike
          landed to tilt the stone.

          Lodged insensate against 
          the headstone,
          hulking oak leaned there
          as a fixture.

III.	  German Family

          Herr Doctor
          at the coming of age
          for his wooded six hundred
          homestead.

         Modest burgs 
         already spotted
         forest river views.
         Herr Doctor
         named his land for a castle tower,
         a sycamore fortress
         overlooking rivers confluence.

         On free hills he constructed
         cabins, 
         dwellings for possum,
         skunk and fishermen.
     
         Rust colored
         and crawling with ivy.  
     
         Where mice ate 
         his attic American history books,
         written in German,
         crumbling in trunks.
     
         Where Victrolas collected 
         the powder of neglect.
     
         Where kerosene kitchens
         offered pensive light 
         in black ink evenings. 

         Dying like a Jefferson,
         he was buried on
         his land in a family plot
         along the common path.

        Overgrown behind a low
        rusty fence,
        he turned to dust with quiet kin,
        quiet earth and quiet hills.

        His daughters in rockers remained,
        resting the acres in 
        Unitarian chapel hands. 

IV.	Urban Study

        The memories, 
        roaming the hide-away cliffs
        in replowed childhood.

        Churchgoers flocked hungry
        with their eyes and stomachs.
     
        They swung mad ropes from a 
        bridge of silver rivets over a
        rushing river.

        They leaped to rapid deeps
        from the highest girders.

        As the poltergeists driving
        daily trains,
        their thunder pounded each tie
        along the bluffs: 

        They came teenage or familied,
        affluent or transient,
        new morality or pagan,

       Retreating in humid breeze  
       or flood plain mosquitoes,
       a mud-land of tree stumps,
       the lace of Queen Ann,
       and the celestial fireflies 
       of wild night. 

       Carnal diets were spread here
       in sleeping bags,
       and shaded guitar intonations 
       with subdued voices 
       they drifted away with the campfires.

       Children sprouted everywhere like saplings
       moving out of  this sanctuary to adulthood,
       Then they scattered across the Earth,
       extending their paths,
       until they ascended skyward.


•	Bergfried is a German word referring to a free standing castle tower. It is
        the name that was given to a 600 acre plot of wooded land in state of
        Missouri at the confluence of the Gasconade and Missouri Rivers. The 
        first owner was a German immigrant and a doctor. Many Germans 
        immigrants settled in this part of Missouri. At one high point on the hilly
        land, one could look out on the conjoining of the two rivers and this may
        have been the reason the original owner gave his land this name. Also at
        this high point on the land there was a sailor’s grave. The large 
        headstone was right at the edge of the bluff looking down on the rivers 
        and an oak tree had fallen on top of the stone, tilting it to the side. The
        dead tree was too heavy to lift and continued to rest on top of the stone.
        After the owner died, the property was managed by two daughters, but
        they soon became too old to manage the property, so they donated it to
        the Eliot Unitarian Chapel in Kirkwood Mo.

**    The Afterbirth Boy and the Double-Faced Man are characters from Native
        American (Plains Indian) folklore. The first people to appear on this land
        were Plains Indians. The Afterbirth Boy is usually portrayed as a heroic  
        monster slayer and the Double-faced Man is generally portrayed as a 
        monstrous human with two faces, one on the front and the other on the
        back of his head.

***   In Native American folklore characters often drifted into the sky to
        become stars. Both the Afterbirth Boy and the Double-Faced Man drifted 
        into the sky to become stars, according to legend.
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