Agnes
That’s from Agnes, he said,
leaning on his rake, pride glinting
from between his teeth, pipe smoke
tracing my face with fingers of
charred oak and buckwheat honey,
and we stood there
looking at the bold line drawn
on the side of the tobacco shed,
in red paint.
I had seen the pictures,
sepia squares from ’72 pasted
under plastic in a thin scrapbook,
squares of brown water and strange
faces, of buildings mud-caked
and shrunk,
the lines and the places that
contained our days gone, roads lost
in a night.
I was young, standing there
looking at a line on a tobacco shed,
and all I knew of floods was they
wrecked my rock dams and took my
boats, took dead trees and old birds
and boredom,
that their roar left the ground swollen
and the banks skinned bare and my
skin dancing.
I didn’t know then that floods
take more, that they take trust
and babies, old friends and dead faith,
that they take tired shrines and
cheap religion, leaving behind
skinned shores,
and that the walls of a life
hold contours of flood lines
traced in red.
I didn’t know the weight
of a high water mark on an old
tobacco shed, of the memories
spilling from pipe smoke, carried
in sepia squares, these tributes
to the cost
of survival lines marking the
date and the place we stood,
or let go.
