OH, BLAND WATER TOWER

and all the space around it

Oh, water tower! Oh, Bland itself! Oh, drive in the country with my brother in search of signs of his childhood, our tales winding as we wend through the foothills of the Ozarks, the southwesterly tumble from alluvial plain to mining country, loam as deep as kindness, streams teeming with catfish and bass, walnut groves, peanut patches, my brother weepy each time we drive under a viaduct of the Rock Island Railroad, eager to take a photo of the water tower, which from below looks like a No. 303 can of peaches descending upon the heartland, the shape of the sky around it suggesting a map of Florida, and how in God’s name did I ever get there, so far from Bland and Hope and Paris, Missouri, from the diners with cube steak and fried chicken specials, with rhubarb pie and coffee thick as a spring flood, Bland where my parents bought a vacation place when my brother was a baby, to heal dad’s heart, to save their marriage, to laze on pontoon boats and play bridge and drink Bloody Mary’s and forget the sharecroppers’ shacks at the bottom of the man-made lake, forget their old neighborhood in the city going up in flames night after night on the TV news.

leave me

May prose and property both die out/ and leave me peace.           
—Lorine Niedecker, “Foreclosure”

Picture her in a hat that once had a bit of flair, but that was long ago, so picture her now, Lorine, ever spare, ever wary, tramping through reeds, through muck in rubber boots and a bulky coat, faded plaid, probably a man’s coat, but she’s a woman in it, a woman of hard hungers and ideas honed like a felling axe. Upper Midwest lake country, town where the post office matters as much as the bank, but with Lorine it’s her house that matters, just a cabin really but hers in a way that says, I don’t give a good goddamn about hanging wallpaper or anything other than reading and writing. Lorine, alone indoors and out, not much company but the typewriter, her keen eye on the neighbor screwing the lid of a popcorn can over a hole in his wall so the wind won’t mouse in, which is what Lorine does. She lays down tiny lines, this time eight of them, tight and tidy on the page, then looks away, maybe through the back window, the one by the pump, before raising it a crack, letting the grief out, letting the mouse in.