Before Me Is Always Fled

1.

It’s my youth’s river I brought
my new person to, a greenspace 

between the river road and a green-
brown water that slackens down-

river into something lake-like, 
my father parking us there some 

Saturdays of summer visitation, 
but I hear there’s less of that now, 

the singles and their kids on Midwest 
beach, or if not less, something else 

entirely now that the water’s crowded 
through with silt and Asian carp. 

It’s not the same but it’s the same
river J nearly drowned in, his upriver, 

which is south for the Meramec, so
I wanted to show her what I was

trying to feel here, but I could see
my once-was reflected back under-

whelming in her eye, so okay look, 
that’s the gazebo I brought my girl-

friend to one night in high school 
so we could be outside and alone 

but got ran off by a man doing some-
thing with his body on the park bench

we couldn’t see. That was a UAW hall, 
shuttered after the plant shut down, 

I ate mulberries off that tree, and 
once my brothers and I found cardboard

boxes of water-damaged porn inside
the shack that used to lean right there, 

right next to the floodplain ball fields 
where we grew up, closed for good 

last year by back-to-back-to-back floods 
and stagnant interest in organized sports. 

Even if it’s hard to believe this place 
was seafloor, I asked her to feel 

with me the limestone beneath our feet 
because will-be and once-was are 

merging more and more in time 
right where we stood, the flood-

waters warm and thick with clay 
that maybe hails from somewhere 

on the other side of the levee. 

7.

Me and J’s hometown is on TV again, akin 
to saying it’s underwater again, only this time 

a 500-year flood, same as last year’s and higher 
than ’93. A dump of winter rain and there’s talk 

of federal funds to re-engineer the submerged 
overpass. There’s talk of who’s to blame. If not 

a storm named Goliath then a levee built for a town 
upstream called Valley Park and its landfill 

counterpart across the river, stood up on floodway 
that was, for a time, an outdoor movie theater. 

My parents took us there, hiding a cooler 
and one or two of us under blankets until

we cleared the ticket-takers. It was all junk 
food and swatting river mosquitos and no clue 

what was passing between my parents up front  
those last years before they split. I was asleep

every time partway into the second feature 
and sad to wake to the car rocking across 

the rutted gravel parking lot that must’ve held 
so much extra Meramec then. It’s no place now, 

another artifact in a mountain of what we say 
is wanted no longer, a burial mound for garbage 

risen as river bluff. My downriver town 
is drowning again, and even if it’s all we can 

talk about, it cannot matter who’s to blame 
in the end, even with evidence to show  

the Army Corps of Engineers built that levee 
eight feet higher than the 100-year flood height. 

How do you name the why when there is 
no why? Yeah no sure, floodplain can be 

commerce district and all this water turn 
this town’s disaster or that’s, but why not 

name the levee Tumulus, one where we 
mourn the bodies downstream? Last summer

T and I drove out to walk the fair-weather 
greenspace we’re calling a park between 

river and levee so I could see what earthworks 
defy such water. There in a place I felt

both inside and out, between our resistance
of what is and what is, I could look up 

to the north and see the landfill patched over 
with weeds and I could look south to watch 

a woman teach a child to ride a bike 
on the trail paved along the levee’s spine. 

12.

            The morning started with memory
of the first time I saw a fish 
            with teeth. On makeshift Midwest 
beach and water low, I found the gar 
                        stranded on gravel-sand and flies

buzzing about and a smell of dead
            water life, flesh that has no business 
with oxygen this side of the surface. 
                        Already I feared what I could
not see below the green and now this.

            They won’t hurt you, my father said. 
They’re more afraid of you than you 
                        are of them. Gar teeth aren’t 
for biting but holding, prey trapped 
            in jaws until it’s thrashed itself 

dead-tired, until it’s swallowed whole. 
                        Gar doesn’t let go. My parents 
split up before that and live 
            two miles apart now, closer 
by foot, and I’m no longer afraid 

                        of gar, though it took knowing 
about their holding on to drop it. 
            But there’s distortion in the air 
this afternoon I can see, and I don’t 
            see it as smoke from out where A 

still lives, half this continent away,
            even if it is. They now have fires there 
we have no number of years for. 
            I have no business breathing
this aerosolization of California 

                        trees and shrub brush, building
materials and the animals that
            couldn’t get fled, and what more 
is there to fear? What does anyone 
                        get away from all that long?