Reinhabiting the canebrake just beyond the edge
of old Max H’s memory, now not like it used to be:
Cane stalks two thumbs thick, thirty feet high, said to stretch a half-mile wide and run
for miles and miles. Every farmer had one, you know.
They called it “the Canebrake.”

This is why we coracle the land: picking up pieces

of cane the way Jack’s friend Neil collects old songs: so you can sing them
when you visit someone’s home, should he gift you
a whole broad board of quarter-milled sassafras,
taking down from the wall his paddle for you to trace on the lumber
its pattern made from his dad’s description of his granddad’s
who once sculled the cypress swamp in search of timber.
 

Old timers say they made them out of sassafras
and I guess there must be a reason for that, though I suppose
walnut or cypress or cedar
would make just as nice a one. It’s not often you find
sassafras big enough to mill a board from
anymore: but I’ll let you have it if you’ll use it.
My granddad would go out every day on his pirogue
to saw down cypress. They went out mostly in winter when the water
was higher, and they could cut up above the butt
of trees where they widened. It didn’t take much to topple over
the boat in the cold water.

I don’t imagine there are stands of cane anywhere

anymore the way they say they used to be. I suppose you’ve read
Audubon’s description from when he was studying
the roosts of passenger pigeons in the brake, when they failed
to kill the bear and had to follow it bleeding
into the cane. They made all sorts of things
out of the cane. But no one knows what their houses
looked like. I do wonder what their houses looked like.
If you see Stephen ask him to explain to you what an elocutionist is.
His mother was an elocutionist.
It sure would’ve been nice to meet her. I only had the chance to get to know Stephen.
He’s got a way with words, too, you know.

I’ll keep my eye out

for thick stands of cane for you.

A deep breath in deep time. A coracle or a bull boat
listening to the Mississippi. The millennial water. The endless horizon
broken and bounded by cane.
People who still have eyes and ears to find
canebrake in the overgrowth. Who still make time
for daylighting the understory. For picking up the stitch now near secret
of cane breaking the infinite horizon. Remember.
Not a remontant memory. Newly present.
Canebrake. Needing us to remember it.
To bring our coracle.