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In the Meantime

The river rose wildly every seventh spring
or so, and down the hatch went the town,
just a floating hat box or two, a cradle,
a cellar door like an ark to float us back
into the story of how we drown but never
for good, or long. How the ornate numbers
of the bank clock filled with flood, how
we scraped minute by minute the mud
from the hours and days until the gears
of time started to catch and count again.
Calamity is how the story goes, how
we built the books of the Bible. Not
the one for church, but the one the gods
of weather inscribed into our shoulder
blades and jawbones to grant them grit
enough to work the dumb flour of day
into bread and breath again. The world
has a habit of ending, every grandmother
and father knew well enough never to say,
so deeply was it stained into the brick
and mind. We live in the meantime
is how I remember the length of twilight
and late summer cicadas grinding the air
into what seemed like unholy racket to us,
but for them was the world’s only music.

Copyright © 2021 by Max Garland. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 11, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

Max Garland is the author of Into the Good World Again (Holy Cow! Press, 2022), and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bush Foundation.

Themes

About Max Garland >

About This Poem

“My grandparents loved to remember the drowning of our western Kentucky town in the 1937 Ohio River flood. I inherited the newspaper images—a Jersey cow on a second story balcony, people rowing down Broadway. That flood became intermingled with the one I learned about in church, Noah’s flood. In fact, history and childhood religion more or less flowed together in an ongoing story of calamity and grit. But honestly, I probably wrote the poem because I liked the sound of the words ‘the river rose wildly’ and wanted to keep that sound going as long as I could.”
—Max Garland

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for all. But to be this life’s
accomplice, better to know
no style or history. Its meanings
deal in apathy and violence
in sordid peace. Under a sun
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I wander like a madman down the Tuscolana,
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over Rome, the Ciociaria, the world,
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What the mouth sings, the soul must learn to forgive.
A rat’s as moral as a monk in the eyes of the real world.
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and turns back upon itself as the tide come sin,
it carries the cry of the loon and the salts
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A distant eagle enters the mouth of a river
salmon no longer run and his wide wings glide
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into the nothing from which he came. Only the thought remains.

Lacking the eagle’s cunning or the wisdom of the sparrow,
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Who will know what the trees know, the spidery patience
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Let me be water. The heart pours out in waves.
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Wind, be a friend.
There’s nothing I couldn’t forgive.

Sam Hamill

1998

The River

And I behold once more
My old familiar haunts; here the blue river,
The same blue wonder that my infant eye
Admired, sage doubting whence the traveller came,—
Whence brought his sunny bubbles ere he washed
The fragrant flag-roots in my father’s fields,
And where thereafter in the world he went.
Look, here he is, unaltered, save that now
He hath broke his banks and flooded all the vales
With his redundant waves.
Here is the rock where, yet a simple child,
I caught with bended pin my earliest fish,
Much triumphing, —and these the fields
Over whose flowers I chased the butterfly,
A blooming hunter of a fairy fine.
And hark! where overhead the ancient crows
Hold their sour conversation in the sky:—
These are the same, but I am not the same,
But wiser than I was, and wise enough
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Me many a sigh. Oh, call not Nature dumb;
These trees and stones are audible to me,
These idle flowers, that tremble in the wind,
I understand their faery syllables,
And all their sad significance. The wind,
That rustles down the well-known forest road—
It hath a sound more eloquent than speech.
The stream, the trees, the grass, the sighing wind,
All of them utter sounds of ’monishment
And grave parental love.
They are not of our race, they seem to say,
And yet have knowledge of our moral race,
And somewhat of majestic sympathy,
Something of pity for the puny clay,
That holds and boasts the immeasurable mind.
I feel as I were welcome to these trees
After long months of weary wandering,
Acknowledged by their hospitable boughs;
They know me as their son, for side by side,
They were coeval with my ancestors,
Adorned with them my country’s primitive times,
And soon may give my dust their funeral shade.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1904

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