IN PRAISE OF PROPER NAMES
Donner

Being a recollection by Virginia Reed Murphy of a journey she made as a child

We have left everything but i dont cair for that we have
got throw with our lives but Dont let this letter dishearten
anybody never take no cutofs and hurry along as fast as you can.

-Twelve-year-old Virginia Reed in a letter to relatives in Illinois at the conclusion of The Donner Party crossing, 1849.

Part One

i.
The first night out
I heard the wind come up and saw three drops
skittering across the skillet. Whoosh,
Ma's black umbrella turned inside-out. Like some
gigantic fruit bat, wings unfurled, it come
flying from the rocks where she stood frying
grits. The rain, dancing in the pan,
exploded into flame. All through the storm,
beneath the sagging upper bunk, my step-dad--
trousers drenched, the dictionary open
on his knees--shouted words and made us guess
the meanings.

Just like folks get cut off from
their roots, a word can too. Take "moniker,"
in England meaning "soverign" or "coin" assumed
to come from "monarch," a word with royal blood.
In Ameriker, this self same "moniker"'s
a cross `twixt "monogram" and "signature,"
and isn't that like us, the Reeds, he said,
trampoosing `cross a continent,
once noblemen, twice immigrants,
now vagabonds?

We weren't prezactly "Reeds," I said. He weren't my real Pa,
and I was slow at twelve to take his name.

ii.
A moniker defined in our John Bee:
"The mark a tramp leaves on a water tower;
hence, in slang, nickname, name."

We named
ourselves the Donner Party and left our mark
on tanks and towers until they thinned to prairies
and pure sky...

iii.

Having most, we Reeds had most to lose--
fireworks in the Rockies on the Fourth,
pickles, ham and fine Wiessboden wine
carried in our trunks a thousand miles.
Our wagon, twice as big as any other,
my step-dad built especially to persuade
my ma (took sick the year before) to come,
with even steps to enter by; spring seats,
wallpaper like a fine stagecoach; a stove,
it pipe struck through raw canvas bleached bone white
as our tow heads by sun; a cook
who's leave the butter churn itself on wheels
that jogged the copybook in which I'd write--
way back among the flour sacks, with that one
squeaky axle and the clanging cast-iron.

Being the biggest, this wagon was the first
abandoned when the oxen dropped of thirst.
One every side, to lighten up their loads,
folks carried household goods, like people fleeing
fire. My mother crossed the burning desert
with the baby and the porcelain lamp. When the tattered
black umbrella broke, I planted it
in salt. Enameled darkness, speckled white,
the sky looked like the canning pot that night.
We buried it in the Humboldt Sink, that marbled
dictionary, too big to carry, inside.

O Papa, what I wouldn't give to hold
that canning pot tonight

iv.

From there it was on foot, and you, John Reed,
in time our rescuer, then merely gone,
who might have known the monikers, if such they were,
the Indians had carved in rock folks said
maybe five hundred years before, next to which
our own ill-centered letterings on stone
and wooden crosses met along the road
looked crude and white as scar.

After a time, the graves was marked no more,
and I'd be thinking: they all done it, all
these nameless ones. Even dogs have done it.
Guess I can do it too, time comes. I guess
instead of doing, I'll be done for, done--

fear clanging in my heart its awful knell,
though all the air for miles around was still.

Part Two

i
By vote we'd named ourselves the Donner Party,
and Mrs. Keseberg said "donner" means
"to give" in French, and give we did--gave out,
gave in, and some gave of their flesh when they
was dead. I would have done it. Don't kid yourself,
my mama said, every living thing
feeds off others. Even them eats reeds,
prairie grass and weeds is eating what's
alive and who's to say all living things
ain't holy? Common sense provides. In the family
living kind, all kin are cannibals

One thing's sure: we ate the dogs before
the dogs ate us. Them, had kept us warm
on the great Salt Flats one night we like to froze.
How huge the sky was then, freckled with stars.
Forgive me, Cash, the end I brung you to.
I felt like Mama combing out our hair
apologizing for our sakes that things
worked out this way. Christ! It weren't her fault.
We children knew. We each take food and space
somebody else could use. Just being born,
a body takes from others. That very thing
Communion's for, said Mrs. Breen. The world's
a supper where the guests consume the host
with or without it, so why not bow your head
before it and give thanks?
Which is why, in the extreme
of winter, shrunk to zero at the marrow,
I give my word I would convert
to Catholic if ever
I got out, and did, and done so.
When it comes to eating others, you need a form.
So sign this poem: your cannibal,
Virginia.

ii.

None of this, bedrock of my belief,
dast I mention in nice company--
that hushed conspiracy
of antimacassar,
tea cozy and foot-warmer
to keep us from bare bones.

But I lately recollect
the hopes we had just starting out--me, riding
bareback by the wagons dreaming of
what would become of us in California,
and all my life spread out before me like
the plains, as wide as noonday sun was high--

And then to enter in the shadow of
the valley of walled rock, the snow so deep
the horses knelt with every step, the mountains
steep as stairs; the cabin's dark, baby's
skull, a knitted cap of lice; nowhere
to shit; the bed we shared, us seven kids,
snowblind, frost bit; each trapped inside his skin
hunger and the howling wind, and them
dead bodies on the roof to weigh upon
the world to which we woke each day anew
with nothing to do but just get on with it.

Part One of Donner was originally published in TriQuarterly, Part Two in The Threepenny Review).