Travel Notes from the River Styx

By Susanna Lang

In the earnest and beautiful Travel Notes from the River Styx, Susanna Lang peers into the tiny mirrors of a river’s current, the mirror her father cannot see himself in, the rearview mirror in which she spies sandhill cranes on an afternoon drive as she interrogates the natural and, at times, unnatural world. The result is a coll

• Language: English
• Publisher: Terrapin Books
• Release date: May 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9780998215921

Susanna Lang

Susanna Lang is the author of two previous books of poetry-Even Now (The Backwaters Press, 2008) and Tracing the Lines (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2013). Her poems have been anthologized in Love Rise Up and City of Big Shoulders as well as Northern Music: Poems About and Inspired by Glenn Gould, and have appeared in such journals as december magazine, North American Review, Poetry East, and Prairie Schooner. A two-time Hambidge fellow and a recipient of the Emerging Writers Fellowship from the Bethesda Writer's Center, her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language. She lives in Chicago, where she teaches in the Chicago Public Schools.

Book preview

I

Road Trip

  Je rêve comme je respire.

    —Carla Bruni, Pas une Dame

You remember the signs along the road

for underground caves, stalactites,

zip lines, miracles. There was a sign

I hadn’t noticed before—Cavern, Ice Age Bones.

As if, on the way south, we could take a detour,

pass through an earlier time, visit our ancestors

as we visited grandparents when we were children,

our fathers driving for days punctuated by exits

advertising cheap motels where we didn’t stop to sleep.

    * * *

The road had been flat at first, flat and straight

for a long time. But you know that:

you’ve come this way often.

I did not pull in at the rest area

near the wind farm, where we’d paused

on earlier trips. Not one of the great blades

was moving, all of them white and flat

and absolute in the thin light. Water stood

in the cornfields, the landscape stilled.

    * * *

When I climbed, finally, into the mountains,

Carla Bruni was singing Je rêve comme je respire

while my small car labored on the steep grade,

and the rain fell as it always falls on those roads.

It’s a story you and I tell about these trips,

the fearful crossing through the mountains, in rain

or snow or fog. This time my father waited

where I stopped for the night, my mother busy

in the kitchen though she, too, was a visitor in that place.

She moved back and forth from counter to stove

with her mother, who was at home there, the rooms

dark in the early evening as if underground.

They set my place at the table, though as in the old stories,

I cannot tell you what we ate. The rules have not changed

about what you can and cannot bring back.

My father was still in his nightshirt but he stood unaided

as he had not done in years, a glass in his hand,

proposing a toast. Has it been like this for you,

have you found the house where your dead linger

along some other road, in the course of some other trip?

    * * *

Next morning the table was bare and the sky

had the stillness that foretells more rain,

the rivers already brimming with mirrors.

I crossed the same river five or six times—

you’ll say it is always that way but this road

seemed to double back on itself, a knot

of water and asphalt. I was not sure of finding the turn,

having been warned that the maps contained errors.

It was as if we had not been there together, my father,

my mother, my mother’s mother and I,

in that darkened house where he toasted our health.

    * * *

The last stage of the journey is on foot, the ground

saturated, the trail almost dissolving under my boots.

Like the river, it doubles back on itself,

the blazes unclear. Trees have fallen across the path,

and though it is easy to climb over them, their gesture

remains. One tree has been sawed into joints,

the skin wrinkled and hardened like the fossils of mastodons

in a world where skin and muscle could be calcified.

Every few steps I pass through a spider web

like an intricate and fragile gate. Chanterelles rise

from below,