An American Map

The River Inside (A Prose Poem): Huzzah River, Missouri

The River Inside (A Prose Poem) Huzzah River, Missouri Listen, how could I know we would end our stay there with a visit to a cemetery, with the trip to those living graves and a church house on a hillside overlooking the Huzzah River that had just run sorrow through valleys and plains, flooding all the way to the Mississippi? But I am ahead of myself. Before all that, there was Easter week, and the cool, newgreen days of early spring. Before that, there was settling on the porch of the hundred-year-old house with beers and wine and catching up and admiring the horses and the one donkey who brays once a day, and there was looking over the rough compound of barns and pumphouse and henhouse and feedhouse and two other cabins where my David’s family live te river inside (a prose poem) 149 when they live here on the river, which is every chance they can get—though St. Louis is where their work is. Despite that, the life they have made on this five hundred acres, on the rise and plain of just-flooded river, is the one they like better. How were we to know what a river would be like after a Holy Week flood, that it would still toss with opaque water, shouting its anger in the headlong rush of moving aside the world, its willful need to push itself out of itself. In its wake, all is off kilter: buildings dip and sour their foundations, fences become tangled walls of oak leaf and plastic and tires and lost tackle. An empty picture frame catches in a branch eight feet up, and the current runs through the frame for hours. Everything leans the way of the flood, for to lean against it is to lose footing and be swept away to a stranger place still. We come from Michigan just after the height of this temper , and we stay through the falling-down time, when each day the level drops and the land rises through the mud, a brown and tree-pocked leaning, a gray-headed turtle revealed but not yet awake. This is the land we walk with Carolina Moon (Caroline for real, Moonie for short) and her adult son Justin, and other of David’s beloved cousins, mine, too, by association and spirit. This is the land we traipse, gathering mud like sleeves over our shoes, down to the low, newly washed and roughed banks to search, with the children, Jake and Maddy, for the bird point arrowheads. And after that hour, having turned up only chips of the infamous Missouri flint, these are the fields we squelch through to the heron rookery to sneak up on their high and ill-formed nests. Though we spot them through the soaring sycamore and hear the croak and bark that warns their world is not well, they spook and fly, chortling into air, and we are given only glimpses of gangly shape, spiky beaks, their ragged lift and cir- an american map 150 cling, never enough for me, never enough of watching wings, hearing some feather-bound voice catch on the wind. We turn away, leave them to their leggy treetop perches. And at the next creek, Justin bends to the bank and from the mix of stone and pebble, lifts a near perfect bird point from the muck. This is the place where after a day of walking, we are invited to Justin’s cabin, where, inside, he has built a tank for river fish. Oh, not just any tank, but one so large it has a foundation and rises as an architectural moment in his living room, four by four by ten feet, with filtered watered the color of the river once it clears, that cooled tea. Here are fourteen rivery ones, bass and sunfish, goggle eye and cat fish, and five lovely turtles, one snapper who will get to stay only so long as he doesn’t eat one of the fourteen. Once he eats his first, Justin takes him back to the river. The painted is my favorite, his sweet patterns carved with a touch of river weed. Oh, and yes, the weeds. Justin has them all in his tank, and so has replicated the river inside his house. I ask him why he brings them in, thinking he must be studying them...