Bergfried
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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.
Copyright © Thomas Wells | Year Posted 2020
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