There is nothing left of you but gnarled rivers hands feeling in the dark for the gulf.
These hands and this face of mine swelled with Trinity River back flood are the end of you.
Nothing left but horses no one wants to know about
whose legs were broken in fields of purple hull peas and sorghum
so they had to be shot with a .22 rifle and drug by their hooves into deeper woods.
There was a daughter named Mary after my grandmother
who choked to death on a chicken bone while you beat upon her back
when Jesus and FDR were not there to save her.
One more thing you didn't ask for to make you go stunned and quiet into evenings
searing with heat and cut jagged by the shrieks of creek herons
some believed were mating calls of Texas apes living in the piney woods.
There was a son named Peyton who died in highschool and noone ever told me why
whose hair was parted in the middle and slicked back
who had one gold tooth in the front that dandified a simple face and made him look like a lover.
Remember the bridge built over Stephen's Creek when Parker Hill Road was the highway.
Before the war my father rode across it in a cart pulled by a spotted mule
and carried water for the hands to drink who labored in the fields and on the road
back when my father was the one with sunlight gathered in his hair
the one that pine trees took up high and gave to him their swaying crowns.
From where I am I see the bridge and the spot of coarse cement stained rusty
where your cousin blew his tired old head off with a shotgun and fell into Stephen’s Creek.
It was a 12 gaged, double_hammered, made by yankees in Hopkins, Minnesota.
His father had replaced the stock after the War Between the States
had carved the stock by hand from a hickory limb torn off in a wind storm
before floods took the pilings from under him
and his son was fallen and gone in water.
After every flood is a gathering of mockingbirds in the branches of wild persimmon trees.
When a joy unsought returns it is familiar as pain.
Soaked ground accepts the rain all it can and sends the rest to Houston and to the gulf.
What is left of me now is a stubborn joy I didn't ask for
and a coil of river water that goes on giving life for life.
Voices rise from this water and talk to me about the sons of men
how they are born and cut down quick legs gone from under them
while the moon gleams in the black face of the sky like a New Orleans tooth.
How we fall from bridges into creeks and we are carried into rivers and a gulf nobody knows
one thing about.
I don't know where the will to go on living comes from when all of us are dead from birth
but if you were here I'd tell you I am stubbornly pleased with myself.
I have climbed high as I can into pine trees and let the silver light there gather in my hair.
I am a river flooded and enough.
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