What levee broke here, daughter?
The mother’s skinny arms of the south, made to poke from sleeveless housedresses
with hands that rest on hips, or wait on the front porch with a glass of
cold water—
Arms that cinched harvests of laundry, once towering above Gibralter,
and that held you to her breast in the river as the preacher shouted from above,
What levee broke here, daughter?
You recall these arms, scrawny with love; but sometimes, the soft glow of a moon mama
falls across your nightly altar
of verses and solitude, a glow of longing from the deep night sky and you fear that you want
this mama more than you crave
cold water.
But when the mind dips its foot over the edge of the earth, you’ll falter—
Struck by the disappointment of limits and What Now; just try, after this, returning
to those you love—
What levee broke here, daughter?
You’ll go home, do dishes, splash suds along your bony arms, but how can you exalt her
when behind every blink your thoughts are wormholes and floating and nothing
rings true, save
cold water.
It grabs your body in two words, a haunting psalter
sweetly shocked; so when you’re asked of
What levee broke here, daughter?
say:
cold water
About the Poet:
Caroline McCraw is a recent graduate of the University of Virginia, where she studied in the Area Program in Poetry Writing and Studio Art Distinguished Majors Program. She was a 2011 University Arts Scholar, and recently received an ACCIAC Award in Creativity and Innovation for her thesis work, Unreal City, a photographic and poetic installation based on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Her work as appeared in Glass,Garden and 3.7 Arts & Literary Magazine. She is from Durham, North Carolina.
