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Canada dry

America wet

10,000 Lakes says every sign

woods of fir and cedar

Minnesota of sky-pond

and brown-green-arboretum.

We’d got there

up from twin-citied Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Dakotas to the west.

Wisconsin to the east.

Manitoba to the north.

Bemidji overnight.

White Earth daytime.

Vizenor family headstones

shadow of the 1862 Dakota War

and link-up with

wholly present-day

Anishinaabe Harold Goodsky

“Sorry can’t stay…

got a golf appointment,”

as he explained

how often he was taken for

the Norwegian Harold Gudski.

But then there was always Longfellow’s Hiawatha

not to say The Hiawatha Line in Minneapolis --

so how do you like your “Indians”?

Like spring water rises

literary memory

Rolvaage’s Earth Giants

Lewis’s Main Streets

Fitzgerald’s James J. Hill

Dylan’s Zimmerman family

Keillor’s Wobegon

Gilliam’s imagination.

Like spring water rises

Anishinaabe big river

Misi-ziibi, gichi-zibi

France’s Messipi

Spain’s Río Misisipí

America’s Mississippi.

Like spring water rises

Melville’s “father of a great multitude of water”