Borders Have Two Sides
Austin led them across the border
in 1822, good people.
He wanted no leatherstockings,
no backwoodsmen, no drunkards,
gamblers, idlers, profane swearers,
just hard-working farmers,
their families, and 443 slaves,
the Old Three Hundred from
Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas,
Tennessee, and Missouri.
Legal immigrants to this northern
desolation of Mexico, for the Mexicans
needed someone to tame
that restless land.
Others
followed, not legal, wading across
the river—wandering, tough, grim.
They cleared land and pushed out
natives. And they brought their music,
their dances with fiddles, their culture,
their language—not accepting Mexican ways.
And now the descendants of the welcomed
and not, pushed to the Rio Grande
and on to the Pacific, build fences
and patrol the river, fearing those
southern aliens will come to tame
this restless land.
The Old Harbor of Belém
Belém. Pará, Brazil
The air above the old harbor of Belém
is stringed like some huge harp
from another cosmos, plaintiff melodies
pitched so high the dogs on the wharves
walk around with ears erect.
The gulls and buzzards slide
among that rigging to search
for morsels from the Ver o Peso
tossed overboard or left on deck
or railing unprotected.
Once, ships from Manchester
unloaded iron houses, ballast
used to cross the Atlantic,
to free space for rubber
from up the Amazon.
Up the street from the old harbor
Paris fashions, cargo with the houses,
have surrendered now to t-shirts
and electronics in the stores’
polished mahogany display cases.
The rubber from upriver purchased
the Paris fashions for evenings
at the opera, when buzzards, gulls,
dogs, and Paraenses could hear
music from distant cosmos.
Clarence Wolfshohl is professor emeritus of English at William Woods University. He operated Timberline Press for thirty-five years until the end of 2010. His poetry and creative fiction have appeared in Concho River Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Colere, Rattlesnake Review, Cenizo Journal, San Pedro River Review, and Melic Review, Houston Literary Review, Right Hand Pointing and Red River Review online. A chapbook of poems about Brazil, Season of Mangos, was published by Adastra Press (2009), and The First Three (2010) and Down Highway 281 (2011) were published by El Grito del Lobo Press. In Harm’s Way: Poems of Childhood in collaboration with Mark Vinz was published by El Grito del Lobo Press in early 2013. A native Texan, Wolfshohl now lives with his writing, two dogs and a cat in a nine-acre woods outside of Fulton, Missouri.