The Upper Mississippi
(Part
II of II, to “Ode to Old Minnesota)
The upper
Mississippi, once free flowing all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico, now:
walled and damned, and diked,
and in the spring, sandbagged to the
hilt along the St Paul banks.
Once
the old levees with their sand boils and cracks, watched those very
houses built on those waterlogged
ramparts—with the rains and winter snows
meltdown—float those houses down river:
unstoppable, unhurried over passing barrages,
until
the current would flow backwards; now tamed, but I less than fifty
years ago, those sandbags were being
bagged with sand, lifted and placed in place—; this was when all men: white,
black, yellow or red,
brown, side by side in shifts: in mud
and rain, innocently in a frantic:
sandbagged—
Showing
God—for once in the whole of a year—man was capable of
working together, enduring together,
bearing one another’s idiosyncrasies, and eccentricities, and little hates, and
precocious
overtones, malice and rage, and trading
whisky kegs for coffee drums,
—Ah!
These days are also vanished of course, gone beneath the motionless currents
of the Mighty Mississippi: but they
were!
Yes,
in this kindness, the Minnesota man served his humble apprenticeship
yearly, reaching beyond the Hounds of
Hell, and industry’s money—
This
was the Minnesota way, back in those far-off days!
Where
streets and townships, and hamlets, and horses, all had Indian-
names;
As
well as rivers and falls, the same.
And
the impregnable woods, where people lived, and cooked, hunted and
fished for a living, were buried with
those very same names
surrounding them: who didn’t even notice
when it was their time to die.
No: 4477 (7-18-2014/Poetic Prose
