Jeff Hardin
Pickwick Lake
"Pickwick was never the wind..."
—Charles Wright
It's now fifteen years
since I started school in Savannah,
river town lodged in a bend of the Tennessee,
town so obsessed with the river
its boys fresh from high school
give themselves to it as their lives'
first occupation, first testing ground.
It is the brown flow and monotoned drawl
their lives have always known. Behind
Pitt's store, above the rock bluffs,
they pitch tents and build fires
to sit all night and talk their dreams,
to listen to the river, to the story it tells
about their fathers and uncles,
their grandfathers: I am the woman
you love beyond words.
From the beginning there was always the river
and then there was Pickwick, magical sound
in all our childhood ears. At school
I could never sit still knowing my brother,
younger, was there with our aunts,
swimming in the lake, his skin turning
brownish gold in the sun. Pickwick
was the sun we carried with us,
which we thought our lives would become.
Even now, sometimes, I still do.
The last time I was home in that county
my grandfathers made, I drove the new-paved
roads off 69, followed them past where we camped
on Porter branch, past Gordon's One-Stop
to the Bruton side of the lake.
From the boat dock I watched the lake
open wide and spread down river
toward the dam and bridge, where at night
the lights from that bridge
are enormous from any shore.
My shore is the afterwards, the long look back
at the past, all I really have and more.
Those lights still hold me as they did
those years ago through the car's back window
when Pop turned toward home and said
school will come early in the morning.
How those lights flashed in my closed eyes
when I couldn't sleep, thinking of sandbars,
of speedboats, of the barges with their
waving men. In his bed, already, my brother
was adrift in his boat, his breathing the waves.
There are days the sound of waves is inescapable.
I feel my life forgetting what could save it.
Those long days, the Pickwick inside me rises,
burns away the fog, the way it does
on any weak-kneed morning above that lake
in southeast Hardin county, south
of Savannah, south of home,
though oddly enough upriver.
Homeworks: An Anthology of Tennessee Writers, 1996.