Mary Kinzie Prize for Poetry
Parable of the Interior Plains
I
The land is crunched East and later West but here these remain the flatlands, the shallow sea, flowpoint for the excitable ranges and sedimentary impatience. Blooms and flushes, metamorphoses and a shedding of skin, and sometime, a familiar proliferation of ants, and sometime, a man with enormously protuberant eyes, looking and feeling something we will never know.
II
It is a cool new year and crowds seethe under warehouse roofs at Department’s Dry-Clean Insurance and Bar, squat tired walls of whipped concrete and shapes we have seen many times; the teller bristling with satisfaction as he counts raffle tickets and levitates imperceptibly.
People flock here for a chance to finish all the things they never began. For the teller’s price, a customer finds waiting for them an engraved lockbox, and in it some precious dream: a cookbook splayed to its final, unwritten recipe, the blank space of a love letter’s last line, dregs from a forgotten bottle, a chess-match’s mating ploy, the heartfelt goodbye with one who oughtn’t have been unknown. I pay everything I have and realize what I hadn’t needed to finish, but to start.
Outside, a warmth pools full the winter air’s assenting pockets. Molten down every leaf, street sign, window and spire, a mute procession of droplets loupe their paths of least resistance at a careful, measured rate.
III
Before the drought we swam the creek on those swelted nights so hot and alive your skin buzzed a dissonance if you did nothing to surprise it. Now they have made rain and we are electric at the shore.
So I jump, footfirst. The current aches to drag me sidelong but is far too weak. Toes knead the softest earth, sunk in silted glacial comminutions timeground so gently and persistently, they are as close to zero as a thing can be without exploding. Behind, someone hacks a halfsmoke laugh, a splash splash-splash, a whistle and a joke, the flappy smacks of cards dealt on a flatworn rock – the incongruous sound of our loves building their tune. The elegant woman with no eyes backstrokes upstream and is for a moment perfectly illuminated by the moon.
And just as we approach something like relief it is broken by floodlight boats and amplified men in reflective yellow suits which leave nothing exposed. They say:
The water is unclean. The water is not water. You must leave.
Either we do not hear them or they have made no noise; we do nothing but what we have been doing. It is only when they begin to pull us from the creek with a long mechanical arm that we react. An effort to dismantle the machinery. Each grasp, our skin tears like wet tissue.