THOMAS BATES (back home)

Oh Come Down to Earth

You are probably saying, "Oh, come down to earth!" But that's the way the Tennessee Valley affects one these days.

                                                                —Lorena Hickok

Muscle Shoals

Here, where the river flexes like a bicep,

the explosives factory is a conscientious objector,

now a fertilizer plant for local agriculture:

phosphorous-blue cover crops and terracing.

Abruptly as the War ended, the arm

of the Tennessee stumps against the dam

like the wrist of an amputee. Phantom pains

of blue current in absent place of fingers

shiver through cables buried down the valley,

inspire towns: Sheffield, Florence, Tuscumbia—

the Promised Land of Ford and Edison,

cities of Ophelia—while electric locusts

swarm in and out of circuits like catfish

crowding through the doors of drowned buildings.

Dissolution Rapture

With the Second Coming, they did not rise

but floated drunkenly to the surface like unconscious

mud cats fished by dynamite concussions.

TVA came and stacked them onto flatbeds,

sometimes five high and a dozen long,

for that great migration to higher ground.

Every once in a while the engineers miss one,

they explained, citing Cedar Hill and Hatmaker,

both of them come up the previous month:

lazy herds of boxes, like humpbacks, ferried

by the current; they gathered at the dam

pearled with nitrate, which acted as a sort of gate

to what is beyond the river: dry land, miles of it,

and fresh burials in the blue-lit Beulah. 

A New Giza

What they could not do with land ramps

they did instead with steel scaffolding—

concrete slope, stair up towards a pinnacle.

The engineers planned with punch card hieroglyphics,

all in the name of Roosevelt, though he would not

lie buried there. The sheer face of the steam

mausoleum and the turbine stacks like obelisks

so impressed Le Corbusier he called the dam

The Guiding Spirit of America. But now the tourists

hunt for secret tunnels beneath the falls,

forgotten doorways, magic rooms: chattering

waves of homesteaders flooded as itinerant towns

in the blue shadows of the eighth wonder;

guiding the shallows, but no god to guide them.

The Great Experiment

The room that houses the humongous generator,

its gyroscopes and valves inspired by Jules Verne,

ticks like a flawless watch the new electricity,

while engineers fret the elasticity of the balance wheel.

One of them squats on a spoke of a turbine,

peering down into the dark hypothesis of water;

another drags his finger across the air, calculating

the generator’s hundred rivets, stars fringing the steel

casing that appears to climb unconstrained by gravity

to the ceiling: the spine of the whole living animal.

These engineers have wives and children,

homes in the valley; they fear the great mortal

will one day gasp and lean forward—tantalized

by the ribbing water, which will rush away terribly. 

Fire Movers

Now and again an oil lantern catches

at the bottom of one of these replica lakes—

spook flares, they call them—and scratches blueprints

like phosphorous emissions on the surface,

igniting schools of blue-orange scales; also the divers,

if there happen to be any, whose suits light up

like fuel rods at the uranium refinery

the river turns. When people overflowed this place,

one family at first refused to relocate, its hearth fire

burning then for three generations; some TVA men

kept it blazing on a lighter drawn by a towboat 

while they fluted them all off to Kentucky.

And presently a cobalt sprite escapes a rusting flue,

floats up—a blue fire in the arms of a canoe.

Sightings

Pilots who fly over this place note

the alien architecture of the windbreaks—

trees where no storm should have planted them—

laid out as landing strips, and the crops’ gold geometry

circling itself like an answer or an error: Here.

They see the wide sinkhole at De Soto Falls

unnatural enough for a saucer to rise out of,

and have the same feeling looking down as those

who stand at the Great Wall looking up: Here,

here we are; the same quiet astonishment people shared

when the men who would build the Douglas announced,

appraising some poor farmland: We’re going to put an ocean—

here. As if the whole Tennessee would gather and stair

so the fields could glut themselves on sites of water. 

Reef I

Norris, Tennessee 1944

The divers come, their slick black muscles

painted like enamel, rocking black snorkels

in their hands. Some of them wear goggles;

others claim the nitrate in the water keeps their eyes

from stinging too badly. They outline the synthetic arc

that was once a valley, twice an ocean, mapping the reef

as it rims the grid of county roads, the hundred acre plots:

corroded skeleton of a combine, the salt-crusted turret

of a silo with its red banner of rust, the strange

alluvial wedge near the refinery’s outpour.

Accomplished swimmers, salamanders: rarely do they

surface out of breath or heave with cold;

casual archaeologists, they pause only to recover

loose rumors from the swirling rooms of eddies.  

Reef II

Horsetooth, Colorado 2002

The girl comes, stunning on the windshield

like a stone against the lake’s surface, her crown

starred and burgundy. Three months later,

when they drain the reservoir, the engineers discover her

half-flesh and flagging red, still belted

inside the rusted chamber. As the water recedes,

they find another girl, barely recognizable,

near the wreck of a jet ski; they recover two more

twisted in rope and clothing, and a mud-sunk

nickelodeon none of them know how got there. 

Finally, the discarded town: an iron pump ringed

by slumped buildings, a fence that survived flotsam,

and, on the outskirts, the tipped cemetery the planners

overlooked, whose dead—thank Christ—never did rise.  

Washday at Stooksberry Farm

Forgetful of the skeletal trees that gape

from the hill climbing suddenly on the house,

four women pull dresses like taffy from iron

barrels, which have been halved by the toothed saw

now hanging by a nail from the shed wall.

What do they keep in the shed? What do they hide

within the house, the roof of the porch jagged

like the wing of a disintegrating cropduster?

Imagine a pair of men in black-tie coming down

the road in a Ford limousine, mincing across

the log that spans the creek rippled by Deucalion bugs,

saying to these women, We require whatever it is

you own, and staring longingly at dripping dresses,

their breath curled like the corners of burning photographs.

Good Earth

Gut-ore soil but green, a stroke of chance

wind in a feedbag, eyeless mule’s head that draws

the soaked cart mucking up the shore among

the new crop of lima beans. The course it follows poor

but for the salt smell training behind like laces of ivy,

baubled green umbels, from all this ester that makes the earth

good—the otherwise metallic, depleted earth.

Cloyed from the pocks of evaporated seas, lately

settled to this material basin, its crown still

anointed with oceans, its cup yet overflowing.

Once the gravel underbelly of a blind mover,

then a dry respite, now shambled in blue current,

a charge without a circuit. Always a table prepared

before its enemies: glacier, erosion, electricity . . .