Travelogue of Eaglet and Leopard
By Evan White


We write the life in the two sundered sides.
Starved Rock, Fallingwater.  Clouds part
red from red and it’s put it down on postcard,

practice a divine art.  Wandering the Mojave,
what was it you said?  Looks so bereft. 
We come to ravine walls, the shocking plentitude.

And you wear your hair low like arrows
swaying on a belt.  Menacing the ground,
be not fallow.  Dogwood bush low
in the wind. Your favorite aphorism,

you are the son of my right hand — everything’s recitation
with you these days.  Self-help on tape on the road
but really listen: something separates out.  We stop for icons
of our task. 15 quarters, then plastic spoils of a giftgrab claw. 

Yours is a bronze eaglet around your neck.
My leopard looks loosed from a bow,
though you insist he just paws the ground

in an old-fashioned effort
to unearth something.

So, adorned again we charade-sway
in the truckstop parking lot.
Arrow’s feather in my fist, I wave it

in a wide arc, everybody get back, and it’s back

to our labors, ending only
at the cut of an earth-rise or
earth-stop, and it’s back 

to Vermillion River.  We can swim in the shallows,
bluegills on the shoals.  Evening, and the latest bluegills 
in hometilt, some impossible nest to fill with their rolling sleep.

Evan White is studying for his master’s in poetry at the University of Chicago with Suzanne Buffam and James Shea (mighty MFA Iowans both), and has a couple of pieces appearing in the spring issue of The Adirondack Review.

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