Silt, Salt, and Yes
At the Red Cross shelter you find my hand. Here the sheet,
here the pillow while your thumb traces the lifeline of my palm.
How this becomes a kiss, me between your lips, while the chainsaws
resurrect the drowned streets, and fresh water. Baby formula.
Canned tuna. Black beans. Applesauce. Granola bars.
Inside, we're learning each other's breath again. Your hair reeks
of silt and river water; I wash it in a plastic basin; my fingers dig
out the dried mud; the soap foam turns lead-colored
while you shiver, eyes clamped shut, lather, then bubbles,
cleans your scalp in my hands, currents of shampoo,
the scent of mint, a downpour of river, stripped of the flood.
The shelter lights go dark at ten. We're not supposed to share
this narrow cot, but you slide your nakedness against me anyway.
Our vinyl mattress shrieks under your thighs, the river off you,
I touch your skin. My tongue finds the salt-crust on your neck,
your pulse jumps under my mouth like something still swimming.
How your teeth catch my lower lip, pulling hard, a hunger
that tastes like the tin your beans came in. And as I cup the damp ache
of your breasts, my thumbs brush your nipples, river-cold, going hard,
how my hands slip over your hip bone, finding the wet, tangled hair
between your legs; we grind in the cramped dark. The cot groans
under us the way the house did before the water took the porch.
Mouth on mouth, salt on silt, the two of us refuse to be swept
anywhere else. And as you grab my shoulders, our bodies claim
what Helene couldn't take: silt, salt, pilot lights out in our drowned town.
I hold you as a cat slips past the kerosene lamp, past the green chair,
past the duffel bag we packed: batteries, matches, a crayon
someone's child left behind. Your body tightens, eyes closed,
hush rises like heat off the river, sealing the night shut.
Mud Wind
The wild woman smells of creek mud this morning,
feeding the wind between what holds and what was
never meant to be sold. I write her down, but the ink disappears,
as if she were already somewhere else. She could be a sky mother
from the Cherokee spirit world, here before the survey stakes,
the deed of trust, before the county line plowed
across her back. She carried water in a coffee can
to keep the beans alive through August. She does not answer
to the storm that stole her river, pulled the water up
through the root-floor and forced the road to forget itself.
The wild woman carries what Helene left and what the hurricane
never touched, her hair matted all silver. I am the one with
the question, watching her hands move through the bee
balm like a water spider settling a debt the world forgot it owed.
The creek took the smokehouse. Took the truck,
flattened the garden fence and stole the photograph from its frame.
The Cherokee did not wait for the rescue that arrived with cameras.
They pulled each other through the gap where the bridge
crosses the Oconaluftee River, hand in hand,
mud up to the elbow, up to the eye. No lens ever found them,
they were already gone, already home, before the trucks
finished parking. The wild woman composts her grief, turning
the loss into something the next season can use. A tiredness
sits below the bone, the mud wind, the water table.
Still, she breathes the same as the ridge exhales
after the storm clears out, without applause
or asking what comes next. There is a stream
that appears on no federal map,
and I understand now why I could never write her down.
Every pen is a stake. Every page, a deed of trust
drawn up between what I saw and what I decided to keep.
I watch the wild woman drink from the stream daily,
wipe her mouth with the back of her hand, keep no record,
and no ink was ever going to pay for it.
