Duck River Latitudes
Mile 98
087° 5’ 13” W
McEwen Bridge: washed away in the 1948 flood: two opposing pilings now
Old Gordon’s Ferry Bridge: built 1896, washed away in the 1902 flood
Gordon’s Chickasaw Ferry: had a handcrank
Natchez Trace ford: crossable in the dry season
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black-blue-blush
the fisher otter drops splashless beneath it (into the floodflow) |
morning light rumours
in the hornbeams so then too greeny blowsy-breasted wood-pewees fleshing air |
nests lichen
grass and spider silk |
the river
crested 5:47 am seeped into the local blazed fields |
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there were no more
birds than usual I think the day the bright lazy day |
river 9.7 feet too high
saucebottle floated by errant |
the farmhands building a wall of sand
near the thin bottomless keelboat on the shore in the evening limping by into aftermath (there for 100 years) |
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skip to the torrential humid
twilight skip to the dumbfounded night skip to the viperish starfall turned in the sky crickets laughed with throbbing hum cicada the smirking syncopation between the two |
the farmhands had built a pyre
burned the keelboat I’m in with the flames now and the loss I should have walked there into their bustling bag— filling and said stop |
the farmhands had raving
eyes of undertakers whose fingerbones had already broken |
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instead
slept to the spill |
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| downstreaming into the Tennessee see less than ten, no see even less stars through the leaves the sophist tuliptree drooping into floriferous crowblack sleep— |
eyes in a gooseleafed bed seesawing while they burned more wood and in the barn horses haunched in their stalls |
Mile 99
087° 15’ 51” W
End of Shelby Bend/Old Church’s Bend
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and I went sucking into the patchwork birds, crested while they sung in the beeches hung over the river |
no one remembers the rationale of the names of these places, I was finally in the sun-honeyed detour of the last twenty miles of history |
on the aerial map faint wagon tracks ended at the shores |
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shores. What can be said about this analogy? I see the cobble of my life versus the loud welcome of the future? I want to ping solemnly into the sixpenny leaves with the northern flickers unable to dust out the mites? this is the sum— |
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| at the known sturgeon hole dropping bait into a black green window into the current |
where you reflected a combination of happy and sad returned |
sublime is a delicately braided explanation in the genes |
| to tackle it to demand more from it be the outsider you needed to un-bend |
a bethlehem cloud formed far away (thunder behind its threat) your stomach was speaking its own needs you wanted to slay every impulse you hesitated you insisted |
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this is the sum |
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| you could not pull from the hole |
ancient & bottomfeeder & bony plates & scutes & spaded snout to stir up silt & barbells |
roe on a plate & isinglass in a bottle & oil burning in the steamboat |
—you packed it up
you figured (the disclosure) was the effort after the experience
the eastern shadows along the banks
the distant smoke venting from a smokehouse on Good Samaritan Ridge
you saw Church Bluff
turning throne-gold that evening
Hicks Bluff purpling
you saw straight whispy lines in the sky
lancing like every pink cardinal
you enforced it:
no shoals at mile ninety-nine—
Mile 100
87° 42’ 30” W
Rough shoals
Remains of an incomplete lock built by the Duck River Slack-Water Navigation Company, which sought to “mortgage upon the works of the Company— upon the negroes now owned, and upon those it designs purchasing with the larger portion of funds arising from the sale of the Bonds. It will, if desired, stipulate in the mortgage, when the work is completed, to sell the negroes, under the supervision of an Agent ... and with the proceeds buy up the same amount of Bonds loaned it, and deliver them to be cancelled; until which time the State shall retain her lien on the Works, Stock and Negroes of the Company, which now owns, and has engaged on the works, eighty-two able-bodied negro men, together with four women, cooks.”
Rock wall (2’ high) no record
Was this an operation?
so stacked the rocks
like a child, that sort of
unskill,
it looked
without exactness,
without purpose.
Balancing had swerved.
Another kind of beauty
was master here, slave
breath burning back over.
At the sight of it
my fortunes orbited or twisted,
devaluing. The master would
drive a whale into a brook
and not say sorry.
Fatigue mattered
over fidelity—
wall
was cipher.
Site of McGraw’s Ferry; no record other than named on map
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