Riverwalking

Camino de Santiago

Here: I precede myself. A pilgrim’s shadow
always one step ahead. On the riverfront,

a hotel called HOTEL bears the fading
letters RESTAURANT behind it.

This land and the hundred footprints it’s
borne, the apricot seeds and the silence.

At the Abbey, St. Jacques confesses himself
a hoarder: a seashell and a Snickers Bar, a photo,

a postcard, a bale of hay, an apricot, a chestnut,
a four-leaf-clover, a notecard that begs: Keep my family

safe. Here are the things we leave behind
that render our bags heavier in their absence.

But we must go on. There
a pregnant oak, knot large as a boulder

slung over its stomach, and is this not
how we all entered the earth? Rupturing

that which carried us, breaking &
entering. It is a holding: the vines rivuleting

across the trunk, entangled like a pair
of necklaces. We lie there useless &

lovely. Say these sunflowers are New Yorkers
stalled at the subway waiting for the next train

to come. Crowded together, eyes locked
on the time-post, close enough to see each other

if only they turned their heads. It is not
only for God. For exercise, for forgetting,

for air raw as the new skin wrought over wound,
for running away & toward, for remembering,

for your reflection caught in the canal
clearer than you’ve ever seen it.

On the pilgrimage it is always Why?
and never For whom?

Interview: Elisa Gonzalez