Inventory of the Drowned Town

When the reservoir lowers in August, the steeple comes back first — a thumb breaking the surface, then a wrist of weathered slate, beckoning no one who remembers the name.

Below, the post office keeps its ledger of small wet vowels. A schoolhouse opens its mouth for the slow fish. The barber's pole still turns in the long meditation of current.

My grandmother was eight here. She tells it like reciting a recipe: two churches, a pharmacy with copper scales, a road that went somewhere the road no longer goes.

The state called it progress and gave each family a check the size of a kitchen window. They left the dead where they were, which is why, in certain weather, the lake sounds like a hymn played underwater, with most of the keys missing.

In autumn the water rises again, swallows the steeple, swallows the wrist. What sinks is not lost, exactly — only translated into a language of pressure and silt, kept fluent by the patient tongues of carp.