american shark
Posted by Richard Thomson | Filed under Poetry, Print
America, not yet born,
fights in the womb of her mother
like a tiger shark
she swallows pieces of her sisters
to prove that she is different, calls them
savages, and is born
America, age two,
squats in the muddy afterbirth
of her history
pretending she is not a child
she spills her drink across
the table of empire and demands
a seat in the high chair of liberty,
still chewing mouthfuls of
wampum and gunpowder
America, age five,
asks the meaning of her name
and gets strange answers
America, feminine form of Americus,
itself Latinized from Amerigo for Vespucci
she has never thought of herself as Italian
and so she asks further
Amerigo, taken from the Gothic Amalrich
meaning “ruler”
she is too young to understand irony
and starts dressing like a princess
America, age eleven,
goes to the library and finds
a book entitled The Mysteries of Blood
it is composed in a language of twenty-six letters,
like Rosetta Stones, the bones of twenty-six ancestors
she has never learned the meaning of their names
Massachuset, Wampanoag name for the “range of hills”,
that form the Berkshires of her spine
Kentucky, derived from the Iroquois word for the “meadowland”
that spreads flat across her stomach
Minnesota, the Dakota Sioux word meaning “cloudy water” for color of her eyes
her body, tattooed with twenty-six codes
for pieces of herself she barely knows
surviving only in echoes
etymologies may be forgotten
but words have a way of growing their own claws
America, age sixteen,
is just learning how to drive
she wears her hair in tight buns to hide
her split-ends slit like hairpin bends
she takes the corners fast
to change direction
but finds she is only ever moving downward
and never checks the rear-view mirror
until America, age eighteen,
looks at herself
and discovers that she is a shark
scientists say that most modern sharks
have evolved to the point of requiring constant movement
to keep water flowing across their gills
and America decides she is no exception
America reaches womanhood believing
that her movement has become biological
that evolution has taken rest out of
the equation, that like a shark,
she must always keep swimming
to keep breathing, working to keep from sinking,
moving towards nothing
but the occasional thin fish of progress
and kept alive only by her own momentum
America, age 235,
has not stopped yet
she says she will rest when she is dead
