Lock and Dam No. 10


Two women stand beside each other watching the Mississippi at Guttenberg.

A speedboat buzzes over the current’s heavy swell, like a fly stunned in August heat.

Long minutes of the barge entering the lock. Long minutes of the waterline creeping. Boats line up at both ends, bobbing, waiting.

Everything takes a long time before what happens next.

In the public library, in a glass case: a replica of the Bible the town is not, it turns out, imperfectly named for.

How much of the world do we take as someone’s misapprehension of what we believe to be true?

The woman who lives in California now carefully studies the lock’s mechanics. She considers the way two parts can be incommensurate, with a jointure engineered for safe passage.

The woman who still lives in Iowa remembers the locks in Ontario, sitting in the fishing boat between her parents: the touch of weedy stones and wet rope, the twisting surge, the sucking-down feeling of the drop.

She wonders if any of this is worth saying.

The women’s shadows stretch out together on the concrete riverwalk.

Nearby, in a one-room aquarium, pike and walleye nose back and forth through the dimness. A turtle blinks in the faint electric hum. Can they recall any fuller life?

The level rises and falls through hidden sluices. Inside, nothing to do but ride it, observe it happening.

Then the gates swing outward, water moving into water as if it could not be otherwise.