Congregations of the Savannah, The First Plague, and The Enigma of Amsterdam Avenue

by Ryan Harper

CONGREGATIONS OF THE SAVANNAH


There is no time to hang one’s harps
at the lip of war
among the enlightened:

Sad Philip, Union Jack, and this
prefatory scrum
of rheumatic rebels

decide their old-world debts, draw down
accounts. The civil
practice long division

and the awakened years are dense
with remainders: first
people, first African,

first Sephardim, the congregants
pitching their tackle
across the Savannah

toward a tory promise, cast
off from the latest
worst-case scenario.

There is no time to hang a scroll
across the freshet; 
the turning current lifts

flotillas of reformed, redeemed—
to Georgia, Baptist 
aching south, following

the promise of a usable
empire, freedom
a host of river fog,

a stream too thick to splash, a way;
to Carolina,
Jew seeing the writing,

again, the El Dorado torque,
plumbs anew those deep
ships of memory, knows

departure like a secret name.
They would have looked strange
to each crossing other:

no words to bring them near, no child
hoisted, a hailed peace
(too many children hoist

already) late for sympathy,
premature for trust,
imagine the exiles,

heads cocked in passing, wondering
at the route, knowing
the form like their own feet—

would not be love, what carries on
between remainders—
yet—it would hold a place

for love until the end of light:
at last, a setting
things down, a gathering,

Savannah-side, each suffering all
that luminescence
in time to try to live.

THE FIRST PLAGUE


Sing it Texarkana
the bluffs called
the shafts given, parish  
in flames
the master’s priests throwing
the voodoo down
headlit hanged men erect 
the obelisk
simple the projections
of every
joker with a staff. Mean-
time goes
the river red, Colfax
to Coushatta
America the un-
recovered
body, its end—cursed
of salt to  
dowse the earth—digging wells
tasting blood.

THE ENIGMA OF AMSTERDAM AVENUE


One summer afternoon it is just empty:
some rogue wave stillness 
interposed in sea state hustle 

              nothing near
              alto misterioso

The cramp undone, the avenue relaxes—
a tendon relieved in spasms
after the exercising of a city 
overtrained—longing shadows 
trapezium over the wrist- 
band crosswalk and brickward slant 

               completing the set
               near nothing

Back it all the smell 
of sunning trash and basswood 
blooms swinging through the scaffold 
arcade; a cellist in some open garret
draws low a hair across the waist

               arpeggios
               in closing sets 

Some broken chord I do not know—
some weary interval, some holding rest—
has me guessing at the space left 
naught but the enigma

Ryan Harper is an Assistant Professor of the Practice at Fairfield University. He is the author of My Beloved Had a Vineyard, winner of the 2017 Prize Americana in poetry (Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2018).  Some of his recent poems and essays have appeared in Paperbark, Meniscus, Fauxmoir, Kithe, Consequence, Fatal Flaw, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. A resident of New York City, Ryan is the creative arts editor of American Religion Journal.