Flood

for James Tate

1. THE WATERS
If you stare out over the waters
on a bright day when the wind is down
and the waters move only to groom
themselves, turning their beautiful faces
a little to guess how the light looks
on them this way, and that. …

If you hear them, contented as they seem
to be, and quiet, so that they seethe,
like a slow fire, and their long syllable
is not broken into music. …

And if you should carry them with you
like the memory of impossible errands
and not know what you carry, nor how,
so that you feel inelevably mute,
as if from birth, then you will be apt
for speech, for books, and you’ll be glib

though it torments you, and you’ll rise
to the sacraments of memory and lie down
unable to forget what you can’t name,
and the wine in your glass will be ink.

2. FLOOD PEAK
Over the rising waters,
like the silver of breath
on a mirror, the shadow
of a cloud luffs by.
This is the way it looks –
beautiful – from far away.

Closer, everything stinks
of the speed it’s being ruined,
exploded, rot with a fever.
Doubtless the graves are open
below us and the roads go
everywhere at once.

The water is herding us
upstairs because the house
is swelling like a grain of rice.
We watch a bloated sow
float by, her teats like buttons
the water will undo from inside.

The window over the bed
doesn’t rattle anymore,
its frame is so thick with sog.
We said we’d never sleep here
again and now there’s nowhere else.

3. RECORD FLOOD
Rain pumped snakes from their holes
and rain was so much rain it began
to leak up and bear on its back

the froth of rain that came
to cover the rain that came before.
Rain with rain on its back goes

where its load needs to go,
all the way to brack, fatigue
from going, the surface always

falling into whatever it covers
until it is gone and the new land
looks as though it always looked

like this, no pod-like propane
tanks blooming against cliffs,
no road the old only know

where it was, no bodies waiting
for dental records, no big time.
Only the blue acres drenched by light.

4. TAKEN AT THE FLOOD
Suddenly the drizzle lifts
its dank voice: a slant
rain and then sleet
sizzles at the windows
like a fury so pure it’s
dispersed by recognizing it,
one of those cramps you get
by loving your children wrongly
that only wrong love and all
your fatal habits will see
you through, though you
rant against them:
lordly as the froth
on the lip of the waterfall,
you urge them to carry you
over, and they do.

5. FLOOD LIGHT
Walking the prairies – sky so vast
and horizon so far around it seems
to fall away from you –

you sense the flood, drained
millennia ago. Here and there the earth
is cracked and scaled, reptilian.

And here and there, as the long light
pours down, you think how the rising
waters would bear up the prairie wind

and its ceaseless murmurs, how silent
this floor would be if the flood
should come again in water.

6. FLOOD PLAIN
You could pick one up, any one
from the scrupulous profusion
by which accident has sown them here,
smoother from their streambed tenure
than jagged from being strewn, and what

would you say you held? You could draw
one of them, or write the letters for stone
in some language, any one of them,
and what then could you say you held?
It would be a clear day, I would be with you,

and we would have a water-lathed box
full of the true history of itself,
to which the history of any treaty
is but a heart-broken footnote.
Only water can read such a book,
or write one. Think how long we’ve
agreed to love each other, and forgot
to care for that dwindling future, as if
we had the time the stones have, or the time
water takes to redistribute the stones.

7. EVERYWHERE
By the way its every
event is local and exact,
and by the reluctance of water
to rise and the way it climbs
its reluctance, so shall you know
flood, and by the way it complies

the erasure of its parts
and takes to itself the local
until all but sky is water.
On this huge page no breath
will write. The text is already
there, restless, revising itself.

- William Matthews