In August 2018, love brought me to Terre Haute, Indiana, and the Wabash River. Below, you can find a poem (with gratitude to Billy Collins' The Great American Poem), which I placed in a bottle and sent out into the meandering Southern flow of the mighty Wabash, the Bell's beer bottle is on its way to New Harmony!
Karen
Chadwick with gratitude to Billy Collins
If this were a non-fiction,
it would begin with a fact, a
town: New Harmony,
a woman alone on a southbound
train
or a young boy on a swing by a
farmhouse.
And as the pages turned, you
would be told
that it was morning or the dead
of night,
and I, the narrator, would
describe
for you the miscellaneous
clouds over the farmhouse.
and what the woman was wearing
on the train
right down to her red tartan
scarf
and the red hat she loved to
wear when traveling,
as well as the cows sliding
past her window.
Eventually—one can only read so
fast—
you would learn either that the
train was bearing
the woman back to the place of
her birth
or that she was headed into the
vast unknown,
and you might just tolerate all
of this
as you waited patiently for
beer to be pulled
in a pub, in a ‘zoo,
or for that stained glass of
the Great Blue Heron come real.
But this is a poem,
and the only characters here
are you and I,
alone in an imaginary room
which will disappear after a
few more lines,
leaving us no time to point
guns at one another
or toss all our wet clothes
into the roaring firepit.
I ask you: who needs the other
woman on the train
and who cares what her black
valise contains?
We have something better than
all this turbulence
lurching toward some ruinous
conclusion.
I mean the sound that we will
hear
as soon as I stop writing and
put down this pen.
I once heard someone compare it
to the sound of crickets in a
field of peonies
or, more faintly, just the wind
over the Wabash River stirring
things that we will never see.
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