The Decay of Silted Speech
John Hansen
The Mississippi unravels her gray braid—
our reflections warped
in her tarnished mirror, she speaks of silt,
iron, and limestone while
you speak the language of drought,
each pause a husk
dropping on cracked acres
each word a wind
whipping black soil to dust.
Straddling the levee’s concrete spine,
I beg you to stop
choking the river’s mouth,
but the silence pools like glyphosate,
and you yell flood
like it’s a metaphor
for when the river gnaws her banks,
for when the Autumn arrives
as a slow hemorrhage, the maples
bleeding with our burnt umber blame.
Even the soybeans yellow in apology,
crushing ghost roots of prairie grass,
and the silos stand like sentinels,
echoing empty
as our last seeds are strewn away.
Finally, you kneel
at the receding waters,
your palm pressed
to a mussel’s wound,
its mother-of-pearl throat
still humming I want to believe
in the alchemy of thaw,
but the ice between us holds,
and instead of ancient glaciers
depositing minerals for fertile soil,
we are two trees decaying
Atrazine in our runoff,
ever widening the current between us,
our roots are exposed,
our bond estranged.
The river mouths her sorrow
to the osprey of her marshes
and the black bears of her deltas—
remember
our shrill screams
that rained poison
over parched fields, that leeched the bank’s
once golden grain.
Running through the grassland fields,
she pours the memory
of our bitter strain.
