Alive in Captivity After the Flood

October 28, 2017

There are lots of ways to be blind,
but you can smell water
even when you can’t read a map:
volcanic beachheads, a wild trench,
ambiguous lines of terrain,
each divided by the transitive property of water.

Admire the math of a cornfield maze,
the farmer who dusts his hands
in fulfillment while the silo leans forward
as if it has something to say.
Beyond it, tamed and peaceful,
a disused church stands, its eyes
broken like the last panes of heaven.

You’ve seen this, and through birthday binoculars
you’ve seen other scapes: ructions at the waterhole
in a world so flat that everything seems in view –
hyenas, vultures, herds of elegant ungulates.

Home it’s all possumhaw and crawdad palace.
I like the land, animals, birds, this place;
still I wonder what it wants me to know.
So I listen when the water speaks;
I look when it tells me to,
but mostly I go when it says go.

 

 


Jerry Bradley is the Leland Best Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Lamar University. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he is the author of 8 books; his work has appeared in Modern Poetry Studies, New England Review, Poetry Magazine, and Southern Humanities Review.

Image by Sam Austin.

Previous Story

Head of the Household [AUDIO]

Next Story

Silver and Lead

Latest from Environment

Photograph of a sawtooth fish, like the ones being endangered in Florida, swimming in blue waters.

The Thrashing

In the Florida Keys, fish like the endangered sawtooth are circling to death. What prophecy is this?
Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree at Night

Owl in the City

By Joan Glass. A wild owl found nestled in the branches of Rockefeller's Christmas Tree shows us how to survive.

Self-Immolation

By Jessica Michael. A song of mourning for the day Philadelphia's skyscrapers silenced 1,400 songbirds forever.
Go toTop

More Like This

Photograph of a sawtooth fish, like the ones being endangered in Florida, swimming in blue waters.

The Thrashing

In the Florida Keys, fish like the endangered sawtooth are circling to death. What prophecy is this?
A hand covered in a blue medical glove is raised over a Black person's face.

Sexting at the Gynecologist

By KB. Sex can be an act of political resistance.