K a t h e r i n e D u c k w o r t h —

from The Silted Bank

The general surface is that of a gently undulating plain

It took Weaver 3 dives to pull Rayford out of the Wolf River. Rayford had entered the water first to test the depth. Or, Rayford entered the water first. When I taught grammar I had to teach it to myself, too.

The zillow ad calls them plantation windows. la jalousie.

Rayford had nearly burnt down the house on Mayfair hunting for mice in the closet.

Chester finished the job before 1940.

A comment on a youtube video of a man dancing

on a cushion of quicksand says, this is how fossils

are made. Haw Gee

When I am playful

I lift the headless Betty Boop figurine from silted bank

Plains turn upland and we would pull off on the side of highway 79 with I think it was plastic milk jugs with blue caps we had with us and we would fill them up near sulphur wells church of christ right around the upper silurian limestone of the lower helderberg and just gee of richardson’s body shop. The old shore line.

The biggest catfish can be pulled from the springville pump station. If you follow elkhorn, you'll get there. The house was demolished between 2021 and 2023. There’s more than one way to get to como. The water witcher could not witch. There was never any salt.

Smilax, persimmon, and grimmia as growth indicative of poverty. We wore matching nautical outfits for a photograph sitting in the branches of the diospyros. White-tailed deer ate them and we ate them. We have all co-evolved a bit there, the fruit that depends on the mammal gut.

At Sulphur Wells, Andrew Jackson speculated along the Big Sandy River, along the old Chickasaw hunting territories, near where the wounded and veteran north carolinians cashed in their paper warrants, where the western territory was quietly opened to his buddies for lease, for salt that was sulphur. The early bison got their licks in, and we would camp near where they were reintroduced at Land Between the Lakes where we saw the ghost in uniform.

Subsoiling 
Sulphur Licks 

Growth indicative of poverty 
Growth indicative of fertility 

Well-watered 

Knowing an exit, and on it, another bloated skunk carcass

Licking up the briny earth

Where uplands turn rim, an army reserve shook his baby dead. A significant watershed. Weird shit goes down there. I love Pink Carlotta in the car lot. I love the Clarksville tobacco, shipped to Senegal right from the port there, on the Cumberland. Would we have met then? I’m thinking who of you I might have known.

Basin turns rim, his father and his father worked for the distillery. Some of their children drank themselves dead or away. Some of those sons then worked and drank on the railroad and survived the tornado. One of the uncles witnessed a lynching. He gave all that land to the holts. Some of the children went presbyterian and hated their fathers. Some of the sons still live with their fathers, like some of the uncles did. None of the grandchildren have children.

Where valley turns ridge, I followed the gray fox into the rhododendron. I watched the bear with her cubs disappear under the solar panels, another kind of bank. It’s humiliating to carve my stupid little car through the hills. I can find a Duckworth in any cemetery. Abel can also mean breath. You know at the end of ET, where he is lying in the creek?

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