My poem, Icarus in a Canoe, was just published in The Original Van Gogh's Ear Anthology, March 14, 2016:
The poem traces the experience of Meriwether Lewis, of the Lewis & Clark expedition, and the ways in which his undiagnosed Bipolar condition propelled him along his journey, but finally overran him in the end.
The Original Van Gogh's Ear can be found at:
https://theoriginalvangoghsearanthology.com/
The journal also published a previous prose poem of mine entitled, The Anthropology of Memory, on October 19, 2013 — scroll down to the second poem on the page:
Dane Cervine Poems in Van Gogh's Ear
Icarus in a Canoe
For Meriwether Lewis of the Lewis & Clark Expedition
He stared at the empty whisky glass
on the cabin’s porch railing,
drifted into drunken clarity.
How he’d dared to be a Columbus,
trek even further into Eden’s Garden
of buffalo, elk and antelope, wild turkey feeding on the hills and plains
as far as the eye could see, deer and beaver uncountable. And coming
down the river towards his canoe, a blanket of white feathers three miles
long, seventy yards wide. And further, the source: acres of white pelicans
preening in summer molt. There was cottonwood, redwood, condor
and grizzly, coyote, the Rockies, finally, the Pacific. Paradise,
danger, everywhere. But now he could no longer sleep,
though he still spread bear skins
and buffalo robe on the floor.
Melancholy had driven him to wilderness,
then mania galvanizing all resolve
in the face of hunger, storm,
the Blackfeet, Shoshone,
the Sioux. Now,
at Grinder’s Inn north of Nashville,
he was near an end, though only thirty-five.
Perhaps he was not made for return,
for settling. Mrs. Grinder heard him
pace that night for hours arguing
with an unseen opponent. Perhaps
Rilke’s angel who simply refused
to fight.
In the early morning,
Meriwether loaded two pistols,
shot himself in the head with one,
the bullet only grazing his skull,
the other fired next at his breast,
the ball emerging low on his backbone.
After failed attacks by grizzly, malaria,
the outraged warriors, he could only stagger now
to his end—taking his razor, cutting himself
from head to foot yelling: I am no coward,
but I am so strong and it is hard to die.
Shortly after sunrise, Mrs. Grinder found him,
listened as his heart stopped beating.
Like any myth, the fall from rapture
the only human return.
Note: Meriwether Lewis was afflicted, and blessed, with a Bi-polar condition before the diagnosis had a name. Which, like Icarus, helped him on his extraordinary journey—bringing both finally to ground.