The Batture

The batture’s water and sand disappear when water swells the river, heat’s portion of a northern winter. Under willows cropped up since our last cow is dead and carried to the batture to be taken by the water clean into another season, we sit on green granite piled deep enough to keep the batture dry one more week. We don’t say so but we wait for the swollen body to appear before us, we want the torn leg to distract us, the loose arm to show us where. We’ve always known which way the water runs, the differences among earth, air, water and whatever the horizon offers that is not actually there. We want to be the ones to identify the missing person. We count the reward we’d earn. There is a family in southern Minnesota keeping a closet of dry-cleaned suits, a mahogany high-boy of ironed shirts, folded undershorts and sweaters. In the ashtray that says Welcome to Nevada are the coins he left without thinking, the only clue which tells his family what they didn’t want to know, he might have known what he was doing. We want to be the ones whose call is first in a series of related events which will end we hope in the family’s satisfaction with the coroner’s identification, and though it is old-fashioned and no longer done in this country, we’d like to think the pennies from his pocket will be mailed to the morgue, polished to their copper finish, pressed to float forever on his eyelids and make us take a second look as the light hits them and they beautifully glitter. We think how glad we were when we first saw him he floated face down in the water which a few moments earlier had been snow his children sledded and slipped on. Light beats gravity, lifts these young trees from the water. This is where we watch time, mark the spot across the water which is the red flag we hope calls us come across and save us. This is twenty-eight states.