This week’s poem revolves around a story that someone holds close “from the time before the river / became lake.” The poem takes us down into the depths and, in so doing, keeps the story about that place alive.

Jeri Theriault’s collection “Radost, my red” was published by Moon Pie Press in 2016. She lives in South Portland and holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and her teaching career included six years as English department chair at the International School of Prague.

After the Flood

By Jeri Theriault

for Leslie, 1998

I visit you at the end of winter

when Tennessee spews

daffodils, though today the sky threatens

snow, as we drive by subdivisions, the homes

of vacationers from Florida

and California. You want to show me,

tell the story again, of the dam

that forced people out, and changed

forever the soul of this county.

First, a few battered houses and rusted trucks—

what it looked like before the flooding.

On the map you point to where we are—

thin blue ribbon beyond the dam,

the unchanged hills and hollows

tied snug in the river’s knot.

We drive by the dam, then walk

fields near the swollen lake,

avoiding prickly pear, snake holes,

haphazard stones. I bend to touch earth

that stains my hands red and clogs

my boot treads. Early iris, bits of metal,

pot shards, guide us to old homesteads,

cratered barn sites and silo foundations,

ruins from the time before the river

became lake. The map shows

where the road beds were,

where they are now—underwater.

Anyone wanting to, could dive down

to that other world, enter rooms, dim

in cold water, find roads, roof tops,

an old plow furred with algae.

Later, we sit on your back step,

smoking and listening to the tree frogs.

We smell unburdened earth,

your cigarette a small torch, your voice

this night’s last vibration.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is Portland’s poet laureate. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2016 Jeri Theriault. It appears in “Radost, my red” (Moon Pie Press, 2016) and appears here by permission of the author. For an archive of all the poems that have appeared in this column, go to www.pressherald.com/tag/deep-water.

Copy the Story Link