cool dusk coming
round the tennessee mountains
crisp crunch of leaves outside
the Grinder’s Stand
where the innkeeper’s wife
offered you a civilized bed
and you said
you’d sleep in your buffalo robe
bear skins upon the hard floor
(was that home to you?
home is not fine linens
home is fur, earthen, heavy)
i heard Mrs. Grinder slept in another house that night,
fearing you were deranged.

was the moon rising up shining
in shades of lunatic laudanum a babble of
voices obscured by the clouds or
just clear and cold and i think
you knew what you were doing

someone heard you pacing that night
muttering to yourself and was it words of
angst at the treachery and political plotting
we now know your predecessor was getting paid off by the spanish,
they were scheming to make the southwest part of the Louisiana Territory
into a new country and
things were getting lost in mountains of debt, also
you couldn’t get a woman to save your life
(what if i had been there to
curl around you like a native woman
and listen to the troubles drain out until you could sleep)
pacing, and you were muttering what?
the manuscript, unfinished, maybe that was
weighing on you the publisher and Jefferson were both
waiting for those journals and weren’t they your passion after all
so why couldn’t you write a word?
weren’t you eager to share those three glorious years with the world
years along the rushing rivers and beyond purple mountains’ majesties and penetrating
the entire continent of north america
well they wanted to hear the story & you didn’t come through
years later they put it together but it wasn’t by your hand

pacing did you see a flash of the great falls perhaps
“truly magnificent and
sublimely grand object which had from the commencement
of time been concealed from the view of civilized men”
and did you think you were really part of the
Corps of Discovery
or was that just another glorious name
for another military mission, army man,
and did you believe it when you told the natives
that Jefferson was their Great Father?
were you recalling those words
pacing
across the floor
of your single space
in the Grinder’s Stand
october night creeping in and
pacing
were there any faces you thought of
any loved ones the women who wouldn’t make it
with you or the men who trusted or betrayed you or
just you and the great American wilderness
the West, pristine all the way until the wide Pacific, free and
maybe you could see down the road to progress after
all you were a governor
wizened by time & military years & your own encounters
you must have known: what did you see, falling from a cliff,
at the arrowpoint of a Blackfoot man, or poisoned ill in the woodlands
you must have seen death and you must have seen America
so what were you muttering under your breath by 3am

were you imagining the schoolchildren centuries later learning about you
in a time of innocence and great expectation and
they know nothing of loneliness or laudanum or the great american betrayal
or the cold
or how the first shot only grazed
your forehead leaving the brain exposed and not that much
blood after all if you were easy to kill you would have
been dead before then but the second hit your chest and don’t worry baby i
probably would have done the same thing
if i was thirtyfive and alone one october night
but not in the wilderness
instead on an expedition to washington to settle my debts
pacing in the Grinder’s Stand

** note: Meriwether Lewis died on October 11, 1809, three years after returning from his much-celebrated Lewis & Clark expedition. After returning, Jefferson had made him the governor of the newly-created Louisiana Territory. Although some claim he was murdered, most historians agree it was suicide: “I fear the weight of his mind has overcome him,” wrote William Clark.