We Are Gentlemen Abroad

My French partner’s passport’s

Dutch, I’m native to New Orleans

to escape Napoleon’s levies,

to which

our ship struck by privateers & stripped

of wine, pigs, our best two sailors,

& kept in Rattlesnake’s lee

a day, in pistol range,

off Sandy Hook New York

is trifling

Landed,

sunburned & excited,

I learn that the body remembers

motion: rooms & streets swoop

seawise. I laugh at my sailor’s walk

but am suddenly weak—

burning, I ride

long arcs, moan, crest

in sunlight & slide, dizzy, down. Is it water

makes such huge noise? Some

dark thing looms, I struggle,

drenched, in a disarray of quilts—

So my English comes pirated,

fevered, Quakered. They wear

gray dresses, & when they open windows

trees waver in ordinary light

& I am John James, agent

in America for Audubon père

who is words on paper here,

an Atlantic of days away

from Rozier & me, men of business.



 

“We Are Gentlemen Abroad” from Commonwealth of Wings: An Ornithological Biography Based on the Life of John James Audubon © 1991 by Pamela Alexander. Published by Wesleyan University Press. Used with permission.