Poetry in The Mad River
Fisher of Men
Free verse
My church is down there in the muddy water.
Log-sized catfish sleeping in the pews —
Preacher said that Jesus was a fisher of men,
but since they damned the creek up years ago,
I’ve been fishing up the angry ghosts
who’s graves those army engineers bulldozed
before they flooded half of Salt Creek valley
to make us this new spot called Lake Monroe.
My church is down there in the muddy water.
Log-sized catfish sleeping in the pews —
at least that’s how I see it when I dream it.
They probably bulldozed the old church, too,
which, you wouldn’t know unless you lived it,
and there’s nobody living it now, you know,
that church was like a bit of heaven to us
folks who spent each day but Sunday out at
the dusty quarry holes and in the fields —
we grew the food you ate and cut the stones
your parents carved their names on when they died,
but Army geniuses forgot to cut our names
into the muddy tomb they left behind.
For just a measly hundred dollars an acre
for the land we loved, they saved us from
the floods that fertilized the fields we farmed
by making sure we wouldn’t get the chance
to plant our backward ways where they would grow.
We are Lake People, now — poured out like water
over Lawrence, Martin, and Monroe —
but we all know a thing or two about
escaping expectations, especially the ghosts.
I fish them out their flooded graves, and don’t
you know the pious, fatherly care I take,
when I put them back in old Salt Creek,
over the damn and past the spillway,
like heaving someone to a better future
to save them from their stagnant past.
Yes, you can have your sails and fat pontoons —
you can’t beat how a live creek moves
between the sycamores and shady oaks
for folk like us who’d rather tend a vine
than check the time they’re coming and leaving
an office up in Bloomington or Indy.
But hey, one day I’m going to catch my momma,
and don’t you bet I’ll recognize her, then —
scales and all, pressed flat as the griddle she used
to smack me with when my evil mouth would run,
or so she’d say — and one eye like the piece of gold
that held her back from kingdom come, which she,
will turn so cold on me, and just like you,
she’ll probably wonder why I didn’t leave.
