Persons Unknown

Homochitto

3 Homochitto for Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee In what language did it mean the river, this tongue of rust that gives the forest a name? The trees can’t tell you, and the forest means you are alone and a hundred years from Natchez when the light begins to fold into the leaves. Not even the birds can tell you. Alone on the ruined wood as Audubon saw them, they can’t even name themselves so they disappear, rising into the dusk, their marks lost in early stars. The painter could bring them down— a brush of shot, then meteors of Latin— Picoides borealis, Campephilus principalis he could raise to that canvas heaven, 4 leaving only empty mouths in the world below. Swallows, starlings tongue the cavities but cannot make the sound, and the flickers offer only a syllable— ki-ki-ki-ki-ki— invisible as the bird everyone is looking for— ivory bill, lightning jag— as if that call might end some other way. As if, in one of a billion trees, those wings might cough from scarred wood and write themselves back into history. The trees are going now, lost in the dark, among them the one you’ll never find, one side washboard-rough, the other smooth as standing water where two men were tied one May night to be beaten from this language. A notebook, an informant’s file might tell the rest, 5 how he spotted them, hitching out of Meadville, how he waved them in, fake badge flashing, how he drove them off the map, headlamps on the clay gash roads and then the opened pith, might record the vanished call— the Kiwu! which means Klansman, I want you! which means you are alone and soon the water will take you and keep everything but the names nothing here remembers. Now the trees give each other the wind or the weight of some passing, and every step stirs the forest’s meal into clouds of wings, moths that tumble toward the river, where they can semaphore like mayflies or dragons on the lilies’ hoods or rise through the trees to eat the night from the brighter silk of day. 6 When the starlight’s lint descends the ground is fluttering. Slowly it peels away in innumerable blades, each one a map of night seen through water or leaves, leaving a bolt, hard and white as bone, as if some bird had fallen where those wings could feather it in quiet, and around it, the shadow a body leaves, the wake through which it falls. Now the light is fine as dust. The ground is cold, rust-dark, smooth as ash. Somewhere there is a name for this. Someone could write it down. ...