A few months ago, my wife and I went to Cape Girardeau, Missouri to visit our sons who are attending Southeast Missouri State University. Cape, as the locals call it, is a bustling river town of forty thousand or so. Like Peoria, the heart of the Archipelago, it was a trading post established by the French in 1733.
During these visits we usual stroll along S. Main Street in the old part of town and stop at the banks of the Mississippi to view that wide, lazy current of water flowing south to Memphis and points further on. There is nothing particularly memorable about that stretch of the river, but strangely enough, it stuck in my unconscious mind.
That night I dreamt about it. I saw that wide current of water, under a full moon, reaching past the town like a great shadowy arm stretching eternally for the sea. It flowed through the wreck of a grand old river steamer. I could not see the sunken hulk, but I felt its presence. A dark presence as if the moss-covered wreck was weighted down with the ghost of a passenger who had a resentment for a malefaction done to him or who befell a ruinous turn of events. The cause of this resentment was not revealed to me.
When I got up in the morning, I scribbled down a few lines describing the dream, concerned that it would fade from my memory over the course of the day. But that was not the case. It dominated my memory. After I had driven past the colorful wooded hills of Missouri, the hectic traffic of St. Louis and the barren, post-harvest fields of Illinois, and arrived home, I was convinced I had to do something with this peculiar anagogic enlightenment. I had no choice; it refused to leave my mind. Based on its’ haunting imagery and the dark emotion it was imbued with, there was either a ghost story in it, or a hard moral tale. Seeing possibilities in both, I decided to put the two themes together. Since I was on a roll with writing verse, and I can use the practice, I worked it into the poem that is printed below.
I hope you enjoy it.
The Lost Card Sharps of Cape Girardeau
Last night I slept in the old town
Where the river current poured
Through my night filled ruminations,
And the shoals of The Stonewall’s wreck.
Through her gambling parlor’s tumbled tables
And card sharp’s sunken skeletons.
Their empty eyes still watched
The silver dollar-glitter
Moon light crossing
The rippled river’s way.
One after another
The Jack of Hearts,
The Joker,
And the Suicide King crept
Through the darkness of the boarding house
And bent to my ear enfolded
In the little death that takes us
Night after night.
All their words were brittle tooth clatter
As jawbones rattled on and on
A bitter protesting prattle.
“How uncivil of that mark we fleeced
To bring his wrath upon us
For teaching him a lesson
On how the cheat is played.
Lodge your complaint with heaven fool!
The Fall has made us all this way -
Nothing more than whirling, spinning
Clock gears wound
By the maker’s invisible hand."
But I murmured in the darkness between
The floorboard creaks and doorknobs squeaks,
'Don't confound God's proof you have free will.
Blame the hands that hid
And held the cheating cards.
Your deceit was not his teacher
You’re cheating not his lesson
But the deliverer of your fates
Your arrogance won’t let you see.’
Prairie Beacon 