Lives of X

Is there a longer death than rivers die
out of the sainted valleys of their first,
following the mist-blown tribes and their dim totems,
and the congregation of saints beside the water
that came and went, and still came and still went
where black stumps of the rotted shipyards stubbed
the sewer-slimed edges of the rotted river?
Where, through the same green cumulus, the spire
the saints appointed as their arm to God
lifted its four clocks to the rose of winds
that took the captains out past Cod,
down river,
clearing Hull point, aslant to Provincetown,
and on to the Azores and Canaries.
Until the Trades grew wicked with their south,
the cargo was still God and Medford Rum,
with barter as it came.
But before landfall
on the Gold Coast, God's corpse went into the hold
and chain and shackles rigged them out as slavers
triangling to Jamaica in their stink
to trade what flesh had not gone to the sharks
for kegs of black molasses, and then home,
the hold scrubbed out with soda, God broken out
like a new flag to fly above the Square
where God's distillery waited for the syrup
to start a new firewater its three ways
from God, past God, to God again one Sunday.