Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Last night, went with GH to the National Black Theater to watch Sancho , written and performed by Paterson Joseph. Brought from the Caribbean to London by his master, Ignatius Sancho rose from servitude through education and patronage to become an author, composer, and letter writer in the eighteenth century. He was even painted by Thomas Gainsborough as an English gentleman. No Moorish prince or spear-shaking warrior for him. The talented Joseph, whose parents also came to London from the Caribbean, from St. Lucia, showed a vital connection to one whom he considered legitimately an ancestor. The first half of the play was well conceived and written, dramatizing his birth on a slave ship, the theatricals at his mistresses' London house, his education by the powerful Montagu family. The courtship portion fell a little flat and the opening of a grocery shop at Westminster felt anticlimactic. But the writing brought the one-man play to a suitably triumphant end, which I won't give...

Nebraska Banged-up Chevy jitters past Wenzl Hardware (closed), Pioneer Theater, (shuttered), Western Outpost (cowboy boots for sale) to Long Home Coffee Company. Inside, three men rhyming with Cezanne mutters about Walmart. A schoolgirl is excited on her phone about a college on the coast. The tablemat plugs a play (New!) about two ladies who lock themselves in a closet and pray when America elects a Democrat. Over the brown sink of the Missouri swoop tiny white-bellied insect-eaters in lasso loops.

Montana Little was lynched here for organizing the miners and lumberjacks and speaking against the war. German was forbidden for a time. Further back, a general asked for the bison to be slaughtered to starve the Indians. In these rich valleys between sky-topping mountains, a river runs through the last best place, and by the river roamed families of triceratops, plucking at the palms with their beaks.

Missouri He came into the world with Halley’s Comet and went out with it, as he fore-said. He trained as a steamship pilot and studied the river’s every swirl and snag. He nicked his penname from an old sailor, an old river cry, meaning, mark the two fathoms that give safe passage. He changed his mind. He decried the domination of the Philippines and praised the Chinese Boxers. He was against slavery but made his masterpiece, Huck, struggle with the common prejudice, terrified he was going to hell for freeing Jim. Have I read it? No… I’d rather float with this boat downriver and think of his dark last years when his daughter Suzy died, and then his wife Olivia died, and then another daughter, the youngest, Jean.

Mississippi Good levees, once built by slaves, then poor Irish, taken over by the state, funded by the Fed, make good fortunes until they don’t. (The wetlands, endemic sponge, are vanishing.) The river sleeps while it runs the manmade course and once in a while wakes up, like an epidemic or a riot, into flood.

Minnesota Get on the green bus. It stopped when the plane on the way to the funeral of steelworker Martin Rukavina crashed into dense forest, but the bus has started up again. Ignore the jeers that you’re hopping on the bandwagon, some wagons just have the better music, Bob Dylan i s playing, and anyway the bus is passing some nice bits of water— Minneapolis, city of water, Minnetonka, big water, Minneota, much water, Minneiska, white water, and, Dakota for waterfall, or curling water, Minnehaha. In memory of Paul Wellstone, United States Senator from 1991 to 2002.

Maine If the Old Sow, sucking whirlpool, with treacherous troughs, standing walls of water, boils and spouts, and that natural impossibility, the reverse waterfall, is the American Charybdis, Scylla is the exposed trail of hikers making their endless way through Acadia, up the mountain, with their packs and in their good- grip shoes, to the glacial erratic called Bubble Rock, which they threaten, in so much photo evidence, to push off and crush who- ever is below, smiling for the record and showing all their teeth. Massachusetts There is a Quality, so familiar, to dismay in social media. The table is set for us to be quotable, be thunderous. Time to slip away from our chair and parley— with the Air. Michigan Five died building Mackinac Bridge— one fell into a caisson, one of a heart attack, two when the catwalk collapsed their first day on the job, and one ascended  too quickly from the straits and died fr...