Canoe
How might we & the waters labor over
now the new naming of the rapid
by those who first travel that stretch
of river named rightfully The Bronco
after the tributary from the South & also
after the way in which they advise
it be treated as a Bronc be
loose in the hips guided by The Elder
look into his eyes his bluebeard
braid please expect the shortest rapture
as danger in those fleets that fly through
the body where the past itself flees then
fixates from the gulches to the minarets
then from the moment to the map
made from the legends told of that
voyage by first the namers then the Russian
trappers the bartenders the riverguides then
the fieldguide sold with illustration
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Dawn Marie Knopf is a writer-in-residence with California Poets in the Schools. Her poems have appeared in the Boston Review, Bomb, Black Warrior Review, and Verse.
