—for Vitus Bering
They’ve closed again the gap that you first sailed,
Russian-sponsored Dane, so cousins on the Diomedes
are in post–Cold War touch. But you made the map
that made the border, sighting lands just guessed at
between Kamchatka and America’s west coast. And we
write history from what’s put down officially, maps
and logbooks made and kept by the survivors
of your death, of your loss of ambition from years
line-toeing across the forehead of Siberia. Finally you set sail for
glory—or not for but from whatever pushes us beyond
our birth-spots. What pushes us away? I, too, have left
for some spot unknown by those who claim me, for
place unhooked from kin and story. I’ve fled
the watched life of any hometown where if
you kick a dog, infect a girl, break a window
the girl turns out to be your mother’s landlord’s
cousin, the dog a beat cop’s mutt, and shards
cut your sister’s foot: Each chafed-at thing’s a window
in your glass-house world. So the age-old lust for places
we pretend are free of consequence. It’s the same
now as it was with Oedipus, poor stiff, running to escape his fate
and running smack dab into it, an awful
scene, a nightmare warning we need to keep
repeating because, of course, fate
never seems immediate. For weeks Bering’s crew feasted
on the delicious bulk of sea cows (now extinct).
They played cards, anted up with otter pelts that promyshlenniki later
stripped from the shores. Foxes bit the men’s toes
at night. The land ate them as they ate the land,
calling it need, worrying about it later.