Jane Duran

Underground railroad
for Lois Ames, Sudbury, Massachusetts

Forgive me for telling this story
when you tell it so well – those cadences, pauses,
your intimacy with it, your white hair,
a descendant straight down the line.
You show us to our guest room
up the steep, wooden back stairs.

But first you stop by a deep fireplace.
No wonder you live here, hold to the house
and the house to you. Your grandfather
was a boy when he crept down those back stairs
and looked through the chinks in the panelling
and saw the firelight, black faces late at night,

runaways, gone in the early hours.
A tense stopping-station, the wagon hitched
to steal away to the next farm, all the way to Canada.
And the fireplace is still walk-in, pots and pans
blackened and hung. Your welcome to us
as I carry the suitcase up the stairs

in the oppression of an August night,
our little room at the top piled with books –
stories, poetry, journeys you take up,
inch by inch efforts you make now,
pain you feel constantly, the owl we listen for,
electric fan that lifts sweat from our faces.

It must have been winter then,
the faces wide-eyed in the firelight.
All night vertical blacknesses hold down farmland
and dew streams up in the morning, brash and blue,
up the screen door, broken breath of a horse
dragging the empty wagon home, stumbling whispers,

my boy on your doorstep, shucking corn in the sun
and you set the breakfast table, lay out
egg cups in your blue dressing gown, and we talk
and listen as old friends will and must,
and see a way, the many ways of telling it.

The way we look at you
photograph of an Apache resistance group by C.S. Fly, 1886

the way we stand and look at you
from scrubland, among thorns
and stones, not downcast

but looking straight at you
and the way a woman’s hands rest
on her skirt, or a child squints

or Naiche’s hands nearly touch
across his belt or the brambles
flare up behind us and in front of us

and our shadows join, but mostly
the way we look out at you
from a far place, from the wrong place

Aquinnah
For we are the people of the first light. Ramona Peters, Wampanoag

Because the light is so intense
I cannot see far enough into it

to find what is there – or who –
just the people closest to me

around a picnic table on a hill,
near the tribal farmhouse-museum

with Wampanoag artefacts,
necklaces, arrowheads.

Even the Atlantic is concealed,
and Nomans Land across the water –

munitions burial-ground, reserve
to oystercatchers, plovers, harriers

and seals that wash up entangled
in blue plastic fishing nets.

It’s our last day on the island.
Reflections, ritual crossings, births

and dissolutions, and the tones of our voices
lilt, merge. The experiences of others

drift through me. The same light
everywhere I look, the same invisibles.