~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Samuel Prestridge

Just as a Huge Tree Falls into Minnesota's Lake Itsaka and Begins Its Drift Southward on the Mississippi, an Underwater Welder Talks to me about Diving, Zero Visibility, and the Threat Imposed by Neutral Buoyancy (Greenville, Mississippi)

After his wife left, fled, or went back home to give birth,

decided not to come back, and didn't send word

of any issue, he never spoke of her, the child,

never tried to see the child, avoided anyone

who might ask. I sometimes thought of the kid, soaking up

whatever his momma's people might say, soaking up

whatever anger might be brought to bear in meeting,

refusing to meet the father.

                                                    After she left, he spent spare time submerged

in the pool, testing diving gear. He liked to see his shimmering, silver

breath, where bubbles hit or missed pretty girls swimming by.

"You breathe," he said. "Whatever else is just convergence."

If that's so, I said, why stay here? She's left. You've stayed put.

Said back, "Big money diving in the Mississippi.

At depth, you can't see anything, water's so muddy.

That kind of dark, you just work and breathe." What worried him:

"A tree falls in the river, soaks two thousand miles.

It soaks and sinks up until it doesn't sink or soak.

Just heaves along, keeping whatever depth, toward the Gulf.

A 1,000 pound trunk will soak up 2.5 times

its weight, gets here moving along at three miles an hour—

fifteen-hundred joules of force, time it gets to me."

Said, "Do the math. Won't see it coming. You stop waiting

to die, go on with your welding, hope it's the next guy's

look-to. If he's lucky, he'll never know what hit him."

After an Impossibly Steep Hill in Yazoo City, through Three Stoplights, to Where Wu Hor's Grocery Used to Be, then Over the Humped-Up Railroad Crossing  . . .

the Delta begins, and the land's so flat you'll see rubber miles

past whatever you sight. You'll come to believe you've grown taller

than anything this side of the horizon, less and except

road signs, bridges, historical markers—impediments  made

by someone like you . . . which only makes you taller still, taller

than trees edging fields, allowances made by someone like you.

And you're taller still—so tall you stand flat-footed, step across

the Yazoo, Big Black, Yockanookany, Sunflower rivers,

the bayous Goshen & Choctaw. (Passing, dip a toe in each . . .

just to say you did.) You're tall enough to straddle fields, to watch

crop dusters buzzing your ankles, to gauge disappearances,

the slow evaporations of Tchula, Midnight, Panther Burn,

Drew, Alligator, Itta Bena, Ruleville.

                                                      Impossibly

tall now, you breathe the halo-drift, the dust from known and unknown

graves—Robert Johnson, Jack Owens, Elmore James, R.L. Burnside.

You draw conclusions. Taller than any arbiter, you stride

west to Rosedale, where the river has receded,

                                                                    and you stand

on the Mississippi River's bank. You're so tall, you likely

can jump it with a running start; you're tall enough to wade it

with impunity, to feel the prehistoric cold sucking

both your feet into a muck for which there is no referent.

              Stand there long enough, the river may return, may take the ground

beneath your feet, however tall you've gotten. It plays no role

in casual assumptions, will not be bound by any faith.

The Mississippi plots shenanigans, keeps insouciant

counsel, biding time, planning outrage. The river does not choose.

It just goes its way, redefining scrabbled bedforms, leaving

oxbows, cutbanks, point bars, fields of national mud where nothing

wise grows.

                       Size yourself against the mudflat between the river

and a withering town, notable only in Johnson's blues

for being on the riverside . . . which it isn't anymore.

Wait there until dusk. The sunset makes the Mississippi shine.

What were your expectations? What did you hope, in coming here?

Samuel Prestridge lives and works in Athens, Georgia. He has published work in numerous publications, including Literary Imagination, Style, The Arkansas Review, As It Ought To Be, Poetry Quarterly, Appalachian Quarterly, Paideuma, The Lullwater Review, Poem, Juke Joint, and The Southern Humanities Review. He is a post-aspirational man whose first book, "A Dog's Job of Work," is seeking publication. He is currently an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Georgia.