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).