“El Dorado”
Museo del Oro/Wikimedia Commons.
Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Peter Campion read this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.
After the accident when we were
safe on the shoulder and she leaned against me
gripping our son as the cruiser
strobed blue and red
there came the helplessness the bare
nerve shudder giving up to air
so in those moments
“I” was this person with my name and also no one
so remembering
crumpled steel and
sun on the silos for miles beyond us
I can make no connection
*
Only the ancient story how a man
clambered from caves where days he dwelt alone
and tribesmen came anointing him
with balsam gum then
sputtering gold dust
through wooden tubes all over him
He walked the talus to the lake where a raft awaited
braziers lavishing shine on the heaped gold
At the center of the lake he scattered
handfuls of gold to the water
and returning to the shore
he doused himself
so colors elusive as the coins and squiggles
on the dorsal of a trout
fell to the cratered basin treasure
the invaders found
vanishing always to wild interior
fell as the tribesmen
bellowed through jaguar masks
*
No one along the breakdown lane in northern Iowa
dressed as a jaguar no one dripped with gold
But that shiver of surrender
flooding my chest
that tremble of unclenching muscle
stranded in the miles of soy bean fields
between one home we left and one we’d never seen
I tell you my wife and son
their warmth against me
the houses
small from the road as a spatter of paint chips
even the billboard above us chewed up
furniture bobbing in the blue
even my own skin
shone with the promise
there was nothing more than this
train of moments
streaming through air
everything gathering
light to its contours
before it disappears