Read More:
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(issue #4)

 

 

 

Weston Cutter
Exposure to Various Flow

 

FOR JOHN HALTER

 

Five to the good, we’d say into radios, the Mississippi filthy, aswirl

and sunflinty all around us, five wide we’d tell the captain

back in the pilot house as he ushered the barge half-blind

toward the dock slowly. There was a line, a piling, green steel

we knew to aim the boat toward kissing. Four and a half.

From the deck Minneapolis stood sunlit, picturesque

as a thin-dressed woman behind us and we ached

to unzip so much, and we floated north in a neighborhood

it was a crap-shoot to bike through past dusk. Four wide.

Different captains wanted different widths,

maneuvering dependent on weather, wind. The best scenario

was dead-on, breezeless, coming in on the line, the barge’s star

-board corner aimed to connect

like a slow-motion prize-fighter’s face with the punch

of the piling. Oddest was how we out there,

bow’s edge, were the nervous ones, watching, while the captains

breathed deep, moving through other currents. Wind

coming one way demanded one steering, the other way

another: you aimed for the bad or good and counted on wind

to correct things in the last seconds. Three to the good. The difference

between coming in bad or good was where the boat was aimed

to blind-man-touch the dock and the difference

between us 19 year olds out on the boat’s guard-

rail and the captains we anxiously talked into the dock was weight,

exposure to various flow, ability to steer 93-ton barges against

and into spring-flood-fed running water or wind. Foot and a half

to the good. The difference was that none of us on those boats’s edges

had taken our loves up to the top floor of any of those skyscrapers

whose reflections we floated past + boated through-

the difference was the captains had,

and did, and while we’d talk kissing and bases the older men

would laugh at us and, arms across their chests, kindly not tell us

what we didn’t know. Foot wide. The best times were easy like

falling, like drinking that fourth beer: inevitable as a perfect

first kiss, or last kiss, or whichever kiss it’d be that let us know

which girl we were supposed to take to those floors and buy dinner for.

We painted our limbs onto the horizon’s darkening blue,

threw heavy rope at metal and hoped it took. Line on. The captains

couldn’t see the corners we stood on with our radios and lifejackets,

we couldn’t've driven those boats, and we never said it but all hoped

someone was watching, would see our cinema, how gently

we could, with effort (rope on metal, river’s current read), guide.

 

Weston Cutter is from Minnesota, has poems forthcoming in the Kenyon Review and Diagram, and his first book of fiction, You’d Be a Stranger, Too, came out this past winter. He edits the blog Corduroy Books.

“Exposure to Various Flow” appeared in our Summer 2010 issue, The Worst Team Money Could Buy.