Santarém By Elizabeth Bishop

ran across the following as part of my old inbox.  have had many rivers this week flowing alongside oneanother, as the Tapajos & Amazon described below.

Santarém

By Elizabeth Bishop

Of course I may be remembering it all wrong

after, after---how many years?

That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther;

more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile

in that conflux of two great rivers, Tapajós, Amazon,

grandly, silently flowing, flowing east.

Suddenly there'd been houses, people, and lots of mongrel

riverboats skittering back and forth

under a sky of gorgeous, under-lit clouds,

with everything gilded, burnished along one side,

and everything bright, cheerful, casual---or so it looked.

I liked the place; I liked the idea of the place.

Two rivers.  Hadn't two rivers sprung

from the Garden of Eden? No, that was four

and they'd diverged.  Here only two

and coming together.  Even if one were tempted

to literary interpretations

such as: life/death, right/wrong, male/female

---such notions would have resolved, dissolved, straight off

in that watery, dazzling dialectic.

In front of the church, the Cathedral, rather,

there was a modest promenade and a belvedere

about to fall into the river,

stubby palms, flamboyants like pans of embers,

buildings one story high, stucco, blue or yellow,

and one house faced with azulejos, buttercup yellow.

The street was deep in dark-gold river sand

damp from the ritual afternoon rain,

and teams of zebus plodded, gentle, proud,

and -blue-,with down-curved horns and hanging ears,

pulling carts with solid wheels.

The zebus' hooves, the people's feet

waded in golden sand,

dampened by golden sand,

so that almost the only sounds were creaks and -shush, shush, shush-.

Two rivers full of crazy shipping---people

all apparently changing their minds, embarking,

disembarking, rowing clumsy dories.

(After the Civil War some Southern families

came here; here they could still own slaves.

They left occasional blue eyes, English names,

and -oars-.  No other place, no one

on all the Amazon's four thousand miles

does anything but paddle.)

A dozen or so young nuns, white-habited,

waved gaily from an old stern-wheeler

getting up steam, already hung with hammocks

---off to their mission, days and days away

up God knows what lost tributary.

Side-wheelers, countless wobbling dugouts...

A cow stood up in one, quite calm,

chewing her cut while being ferried,

tipping, wobbling, somewhere, to be married.

A river schooner with raked masts

and violet-colored sails tacked so close

her bowsprit seemed to touch the church

(Cathedral, rather!).  A week or so before

there'd been a thunderstorm and the Catheral'd

been struck by lightning.  One tower had

a widening zigzag crack all the way down.

It was a miracle.  The priest's house right next door

had been struck, too, and his brass bed

(the only one in town) galvanized black.

-Graças a deus- --- he'd been in Belém.

In the blue pharmacy the pharmacist

had hung an empty wasps' next from a shelf:

small, exquisite, clean matte white,

and hard as stucco.  I admired it

so much he gave it to me.

Then---my ship's whistle blew.  I couldn't stay.

Back on board, a fellow-passenger, Mr. Swan,

Dutch, the retiring head of Philips Electric,

really a very nice old man,

who wanted to see the Amazon before he died,

asked, "What's that ugly thing?"