issue 13, 1993
The Crossing
We came when the crowds came, down into the matter,
the end of daylight, res publica,
the present, salt-stained city dock.
That marriage of timber and stone any slight shifting
might snap. We were after a view,
a place we might stand, a ground so solid in which
to believe, watching the sky for a flicker, a sign,
the sudden flare of fireworks.
Imagine the way it must have looked,
me staring at the women
who stared far out to sea.
So often I’m struck by that dream,
when the tide itself is the issue
in question. And the moon’s slick lane
laid down like an answer, so solid
you can’t help but cross,
stepping on like the Celts who passed freely between both sides
as they strayed from the hunt, far past the limits
of the only knowable world.
————
Author’s Statement — “The Crossing” appears in my first book, Shepherdess with an Automatic, and was written during an arid summer when I lived within walking range of several rivers that fed into the Chesapeake Bay. I’d been reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek alongside the medieval Welsh tales collected in The Mabinogion—two distinct portals of time-travel and enchantment, two story-telling modes that still hold healing power in a time of rising tides. Thanks, HFR, for your support!
Jane Satterfield is the recipient of awards in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, Bellingham Review, Ledbury Poetry Festival, Mslexia, and more. Her books of poetry are Her Familiars, Assignation at Vanishing Point, Shepherdess with an Automatic, and Apocalypse Mix, winner of the 2016 Autumn House Poetry Prize; her nonfiction includes the book Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond and recent essays in Ascent, DIAGRAM, Entropy, and Tupelo Quarterly. New poems may be found in Ecotone, Hopkins Review, Literary Matters, Missouri Review, Orion, and other journals. Satterfield has served on the faculty of the West Chester Poetry Conference and as a Salisbury Poet-in-Residence. She is married to poet Ned Balbo and lives in Baltimore where she is a professor of writing at Loyola University Maryland. Visit her at janesatterfield.org.