Fort Scott

One July, a boat caught fire and sank,
a turtle washed ashore with a hook
in its throat—even with steady wind,
the green waves didn’t rattle much: a little engine
explosion, a little decomposition.
I was seventeen, and the spring floods some months
earlier had buckled our dock. Styrofoam
and wood planks together underwater,
minnows and grass snakes in the drowning reeds.
Today is a warm fall. The Fort Scott Manor
brims with old men acknowledging climate change.
They talk in a puzzle room. “The lake doesn’t freeze
like it used to.” And memories trigger your own.
Misplaced remain the interlocking years of Kansas.

There isn’t a limit for the bluegill caught
without a license, and young boys spend
their days like pennies, on an afternoon
with a flinching rod, a night in the cool basements.
I invested weeks and months as cheaply.
Behind all of the houses that I knew,
forest and poison oak opened to little footpaths
trampled by native animals. Bordering this stood a shed
of saws and old plywood; a shovel to carry some dying mole;
a rope and recollection of panthers escaped from a nearby zoo.
I never saw one, but their legend sprawled Oklahoma
and East Texas, where they were first said to enter
the wild again. Except for the mole, all I ever found
were a dozen or so abandoned dogs from town
and the neighbor’s pumpkin cat. Everything else
was fireflies, or similarly small and in the air.

In the water, life was easier to come by.
I opened a hundred mussels and kept another
thousand in corrals made of tumbled stones.
Leeches lived there, and crawfish—which migrated sometimes
up the road, to nest in finger-sized holes along the ditch;
to dry out, midway, on the gravel and feed the ants.
You encountered those during the dry months,
when every plant was brown except the weeds
around the lake. It felt, on warmer days,
like an evaporating pot of water, which felt,
even more than the ocean, like a compensation
for all the years God has withheld rain.

In every shrinking town is that smoldering building.
Near the fort crumbles a warehouse. Houses sell.
Of the three I knew so well since childhood,
two belong now to strangers, and
if there’s something to say, it’s that
I haven’t visited the lake in many summers.
Those count for a long time. What families remain.
What vaudeville is at the local theatre. I keep thinking
of new measurements, things lost, things unchanged.
Like curious children the herons are still wading
in the shadows, channel catfish asleep in the mire.
Maybe what’s important is cyclical. Is it
that light I couldn’t forget? A house across the water,
yellow lamps blinking on every early morning.
The nights were made of glass. Those lamps,
the stirring of families before dawn,
competitors of the moon.