THE POEM:

 

Story of Her Shore

Angie Macri

 

With the text of a breath, the Mississippi

reads her shore, and voices like pins

drop on the floor, absorbed

by the sky under which they fall

even as they scatter in wings

and acres.

 

From the bluff, people watched the houses

fall, the river having made up her mind

which way to run.  Neither door

nor foundation was any match

for her stamina.

 

She made her bed and she lay

down in it, breathing in willows

and cottonwoods, chimney bricks

and windows.  Open eyes

crushed shut

from right angles.

 

The orchards, the penetrating roots

of roses rubbed along her back

as she stretched out, relaxed

and wide.  The clouds opened

as white as the mouth

of the snake, and she slid by

into cotton.

 

BACKGROUND OF THE POEM:

This poem is part of the story of Kaskaskia, the first state capital of Illinois.  The Mississippi changed course in 1881, so Kaskaskia is underwater now.  I grew up near what was left, in a place that my mother’s family had lived for centuries.  Naturally the river was part of our life.

 

The form of the poem followed the river, and I used slant rhymes in each stanza to give some cohesion, but my main challenge in this poem was how to reveal the river through the figure of a woman and to reveal the woman through the figure of a river without using personification that fell prey to the cute or untrue.

 

Being a fanciful child, I’d grown up thinking of the Mississippi as a she, never as Old Man River, and this matched what I learned later, that the river used to be called the Rivière de la Conception, like the Church of the Immaculate Conception that has been saved from the floods to remain on Kaskaskia Island even today.

 

The river echoes the centuries of women on the shores, and we all are part of each other’s story.

 

ABOUT THE POET:

 

Angie Macri, an Arkansas Arts Council fellow, teaches in Little Rock.  Her recent poems have appeared in Third Coast, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and The Pinch and are forthcoming in Natural Bridge and A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (University of Akron Press).