PORTLAND’S WATERFRONT HISTORY
by Tricia Knoll
If my hometown is a Portlandia joke, it’s a shaggy dog story
about a burly German Shepherd chasing Canada geese
up the waterfront. Muddy pawprints. A couples’ brisk-walk chat
about gluten-free matzoh near the police memorial.
If it’s an epic, then the lineage of birthright river people,
ten thousand who gathered on these banks where the geese feed now,
their fires burning below drum-talk of fish, trade and mates.
That land a park named for a white settler, Elizabeth Caruthers.
If a discarded history book, yellow at the edges, then not
the down-played flood allowed to destroy red-lined Vanport,
more often sepia photos of two rich white men
who flipped a coin to name a bustling pioneer city.
Today I read Stafford on the northern-most stone bench. Star-clusters
of cherry blossoms sway overhead, blessing thirteen granite stones
carved with Nikkei poems. The names of internment camps.
His voice: now is made out of ghosts.
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