Louisiana Purchase
Who knows but that Meriwether Lewis’s
lost diaries might turn up yet
packed in a can in some cramped ex-midden
dug up a thousand years from now,
that elegant, exfoliate style
continue on up the Missouri, into sadness
and disrepute, the suicide in a hotel in Tennessee
no more important now than the bundle
of grasses my friend made out in the woods
yesterday and gave to me after a meeting
in which she confessed she’s afraid of everything
that’s coming. The past I don’t mind, she said,
and laughed as if that was something.
Copyright Credit: Charlie Smith, “Louisiana Purchase” from Heroin and Other Poems. Copyright © 2000 by Charlie Smith. Reprinted with the permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. This selection may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Source: Heroin and Other Poems (W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2000)