Bodhisattvas Journeying to White
Mountains in Colonial New England

Into a bluff that flanks a little bay
a ferry road descends to river waters.
Small trees and grasses gather in its way.
But years before, and scores of sons and daughters
prior, a boatman carried travelers forth
across the Merrimack, connecting folk
of Boston to the wilderness up north.
Some bore a distant look, and would provoke
the ferryman to muse about their eyes:
desolate, watery, and streaked with blood,
they see beyond but do not recognize
the interval entailed within this flood,
as if to say that one shore of my river
is like the other shoreline of that river.



copyright 2002 Gregory Perry