I.
The child scrambles from the car, sneakered feet firm on the spongy ground, the river cane a swaying wall before her—green, green all around, the song of a red-winged blackbird, the oh-so-gentle sound of the river, water sliding over boulders, down from mountains miles away, bound for the Tennessee, for the Mississippi beyond that, bound onward, always onward, though for the child it is the river here, the place she knows and where she returns, her father cutting cane for his pole beans, a cane apiece for her and her two sisters, horses they will gallop, their own childhood a river whose current they ride unknowingly.
II.
The plank bridge rattles beneath the car tires, the river below, her eyes straight ahead, no courage for a downward glance, though she knows the cane no longer grows along the bank, no longer holds the earth secure through spring’s floods, summer’s sun, and winter’s wild winds. Even the air is different—smell of the always damp, always verdant replaced by diesel fumes from orange machinery crawling over the land where once turtles sunned, rich silt scraped and packed into the red clay of the surrounding land.
Tomorrow the water will rise, will wash away all traces of cane and blackbird, her footsteps from years past, and the father beside her teaching her to navigate the narrow planks will himself be gone in ten years, carried away by the great heart that thuds in his chest, her own childhood a dream settling beneath the new lake, scenes that waver the way all watery worlds imagine themselves.