The bats fly erratic from the black tupelos. As though the air is a current with
eddies, riptides, unseen obstacles. They fly above the head of the pregnant
woman across the river who yesterday was gutting the carcass of a whitetail she
shot while it was eating from her apple trees. She is large at twilight. She cups
two hands beneath her belly. News of her last miscarriage spread across our
bottomlands like heat lightning, which is said to prefigure a drowning. The boy
last spring was carried by the swollen river then found bobbing amid the rocks
past Prothonotary Falls. His mother saw the corpse before it was washed. It
was the color of our river. It was the color of mud. In her dreams her son is
washing into the mouth of a great alluvial womb. He is trying to form himself
from loam. Yesterday my brother and I swam across the river to touch the
bloodied side of the dead doe. The blood was still wet. The doe's side was
caked with mud. The flesh warm. And the heat lightning kept appearing
above the tupelos as we swam back.