From the Fishouse

Men sit in the hot house until stacked
spirals of cane burn back into carbon—

they know the time when nothing’s left
to tell it by. There are drawings of men

with the heads of turkey and bear,
and drawings of animals with the heads

of men. In the granary, a mouse sleeps
in the jaws of a rattlesnake,

it has been so charmed. Bartram’s clearly
lost, dreaming on pine needles

where the swamp turns into a stream.
I think he crossed the River Flint

where magnolia leaves stiff as parchment
fall to asphalt in a small town I’ve come

to consider cursed, though I am not prone
to superstition, only the occasional lapse

from reason or sly embellishment.
Where city fathers drained municipal pools

so the races would not commingle.
And the most peaceable creatures

are flayed, each in its own season.

*

The hunting camp’s gambrel hook swings
empty like a new letter in the alphabet,

character in a gothic syllabary. In the creek
beside the camp of red-necked augurs,

my father’s seen crawfish big as lobsters
feeding on guts. If anything keeps us

from spinning into chaos it’s the swamp
De Soto called “Toa” as he slunk through

in the 1550s. Mud can cure entropy—
I’ve plastered it on my chest and risen up

gargantuan from the pits. Once a rattlesnake
stretched clear across the road,

and I felt the tire-thump over its belly
in my own tailbone. The snake kept going

into the cane. Better not to have bones
if you’re in danger of being crushed.

Better to stay low and cultivate a presence.
The last time I was home there was a drought,

and really no reason for Oglethorpe Bridge,
so I drove back from where I’d come,

towards the smell of burning grass
in the new developments, where recent immigrants

rake embers on a lawn, paint melting
off the tines. From one window

there’s a dry lake, and my father sits
with his back to the scene, his fingers gnarled

into flower buds by a stroke. My description
is half hope, half irony. Bartram knew

that naming was a misguided enterprise.
No one’s sure where he was during 1774.

Likewise, this is an undocumented time.
The hornbeam is one long nerve between worlds.

If Bartram didn’t sleep in the woods
near my home what does it matter? No one told

the natives their enemy De Soto was dead,
his body loaded with sand and sunk

into the Mississippi, the “sire of many rivers.”
You’re invited anyway to fathom the publications

of this stream, the many lost volumes of mud
it took to call this land riverine.

After Bartram crossed the flooding
Flint, he had to go on alone.

His rations were low during July 1775.
Though his hand shook with hunger,

he took great care to draw a crane
he’d never seen before. In this way we depict

what we devour and dream of our fathers.
The mouse writhes in the belly of fire.

Bartram was starving and took the bird’s
roasted flesh to his own, his hands

black with ink or ash—who’s left to tell?