the poetrysheet
whimsy, subversion, bowling
Number 467, Feb. 20, 2004
William Stanley Braithwaite (1878-1962)
“I read once about how
mayfly worms live in the mud, in the bottom of a pond for eighteen years and how
when they get out, finally become flies they mate and die all in an hour.
That’s living, huh?”
—Timmy to his dad in From Rockaway by Jill Eisenstadt
John rents the place he lives in—a concrete
house, the kind of place people used to build in river bottoms. From a
distance, it looks like just an old-time railroad stop. A house big enough to
room boarders, a building that used to be a small store, a road crossing the
tracks, and a few outbuildings. It sits in a flat of elm and cottonwood just up
from a river slough. Loess hills covered in sycamore giving over to oak rise up
just across the road.
But up close, it’s easy to see the whole
two and a half stories of the house, top to bottom, floors and all—except the
roof—is poured concrete. The cellar is deep, twelve or more feet from the
bottom of the floor above. And it’s all old-style concrete, hundred-year-ago
concrete—not smooth the smooth, sterile stuff of modern parking garages, but rough,
layered rock, like sedimentary strata. Sometimes the knots in the boards that
made the forms still rise on the walls where the cinder and gravel in the mix
aren’t too thick. Workmen impressed their hands and feet into the foundation,
leaving fossil tracks of lost crafts.
The house is not flood proof, because
smart people understand nothing in a river bottom is flood proof, or even that
flood is controlled or controllable. There is almost an innate comprehension
that river bottom, no matter how many dikes, jetties, and levees you build, is
still river bottom and that nature will be nature, regardless of what great
engineers we think we are.
Rather, John’s house is flood friendly.
It’s the kind of house that was meant to let flood come and go, to stand there
with its pantlegs rolled up while the tide rose and fell. When the Missouri
took a mind of it’s own, the inhabitants would just have to move their goods to
the second floor and wait for the water to recede.
Then, when the water was back in the
river, they would remove the ruined wood, the rugs, whatever was left of the
wallpaper and hose the place out. Then they’d put it all back again.
In short, flood was inconvenient, but
wasn’t a reason to make a call for disaster relief funds. It was a reason to redecorate.
Today’s poem:
Walking stick
By Bill Bauer
Gnarly and old, it must present itself
as an antique shed by a tree.
Elk will have meandered over it.
It must have a history of some kind,
poking up from dry aspen leaves.
Head high or more,
there must be a place
between arthritic joints
a human hand can grasp
and feel consoled.
At its bottom most point,
it should be an inch or two wide
to steady the hiker
in mud or snow,
yet sharp enough to be a weapon
against cougar or bear,
the shaft capable of allowing
an unstable person
to balance on a log
over a rushing stream.
All of those qualities and yet
thick enough to leave a print
back to the trail head
in freshly falling snow.
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