The Choptank River Poem by Lamont Palmer (Lamont Palmer)

'Earth's the right place for love: I don't know where it's likely to go better.' - Robert Frost, 'Birches'.


For Renee Driver



1.
The bridge has come together with memory.
it is a strange kind of health, not far from
the county hospital: river is memory
itself; the radio station; the gulls;
the salt air, the union, the white Calais;
we were fishing. Our rods were our urges.

Remember the drives? The incessant trips?
The base of emotion, the music in the
mentality: the one motel with
no working phone? There was the sky and the belief
in it. I called you 'Giggles'. Time held its breath.

Days so hot, shirts came off: nights so hot,
the road burned up, like Cambridge and the sun
stood together, and the moon, unable to cool
this blue, settled town.



2.
Route 50, the surrogate home! The early
90's when it all was new to us, the vital
water that passed under the bridge, and through
our explorations, struck us, as we stood, staring off,

enlivening briefly, those lives, those days, those eyes,
like Shelley, overcome with the idea
of water, and the feel of it: turgid blue.
We drowned, yet eluded the inconvenience of doom.