The blue heron dances with her reflection on the long brown water, south to north under a dull, refracted light cast from a sky full of rain heavy clouds. As I walk onto the wharf, a common grackle glides to a halt, nods– spreads wings to the wet breeze.
The last song playing on the radio is still singing in my head. A dark hymnal that hums of the Ohio River Valley Gothic, and I see a mirror of me in long brown water.
(* inspired in part by a song by Bowerbirds)
2 February 2024 / 0010 hrs
No matter what I’ve told myself over the years, I’ve always been steeped in this kind of Gothic. A childhood in the rust belt around folding farms and closing steel Mills, all just a few degrees separated from day-to-day existence… but close enough that I had a front seat to the sort of geographic necrophilia that happens in the country.
I can never quite meditate it out of my bones.
The Gothic that makes for good television is a more urbane kind a Gothic that lacks that determinism. It’s a Gothic without determinism. It languishes and chokes like the endless summers and New Orleans. Undying, but never quite replenished. Strangled.
This Gothic that infects me, this Ohio River Valley Gothic, is imbued with that determinism. It means you know where you are and hang the fuck on, no matter what. Grit your God damn teeth, spit and keep moving. There’s no escape from pain. What escape exists is only temporary and comes with a hefty price. Better to grit and hang on.
The Southern Gothic languishes in the past. the Midwest Gothic is all hard and deterministic, ike the high desert winters. But the Ohio River Valley Gothic waxes in wanes. It ebbs and flows. It both languishes and is bone and sinew built with determinism. This is what the river brings, deposits like high water mud and driftwoodbone and garbage from up river. It rides in on cross currents.
—
no escaping the massive corn fields
etched into the imagination.
we take turns playing scarecrow
as the water rises, biding time
in the company of grackles.
It’s one of those scenes that reminds me of where I’m from:
a half-desiccated deer carcass
(death by hit and run)
partially baptized
in a Southern Indiana winter cornfield
