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The Ait

The ait emerges when the summer river falls,
like any piece of river bottom hung out to dry,
at first it’s mud-draped, but shoots soon peep through,
and the mud dries, as the ait rises, a giant’s pate,
from the subsiding flood.

October bares the ruined docks, the stubs of brick
and cinder block that mark what stood there once:
privacy was wanted for experiments that could not have
stood the light of day, but springs are wetter now and
the Good Dr. had to pack his things and go.

It doesn’t happen quickly—
that slow emergence suggests a hesitancy,
a fear, perhaps, of showing too much
of what normally lies hidden
beneath the opaque and rolling waters.

Old-timers talk about the island readily enough:
how it’s called the ait because that’s what you
call a thing hidden by flood and revealed by drought,
an intermittent island. But ask about the ruins,
the Good Dr., or anything to do
with what happened there,
they find something else to talk about:
the weather, a new grandbaby, them politicians.

Take a skiff out there in the fall of a dry year,
moor it to some tenacious weed,
poke around in the silted foundations,
you won’t find skeletons, they’re long gone,
washed downriver to the Gulf of Mexico,
or buried in a pothole where the water’s deep,
you won’t fine the tiny ones for sure,
they’re much too fragile to endure.

The rains come in spring and the ait sounds,
taking a deep breath, I’m sure,
it’s going to be down there a long time,
but it won’t be alone.