The River Where You Forgot My Name

by Corrie Williamson

Overview

Winner, Montana Book Award-Honor Book, 2019

The River Where You Forgot My Name travels between early 1800s Virginia and Missouri and present-day western Montana, a place where “bats sail the river of dark.” In their crosscutting, the poems in this collection reflect on American progress; technology, exploration, and environment; and the ever-changing landscape at the intersection of wilderness and civilization.
 
Three of the book’s five sections follow poet Corrie Williamson’s experiences while living for five years in western Montana. The remaining sections are persona poems written in the voice of Julia Hancock Clark, wife of William Clark, who she married soon after he returned from his western expedition with Meriwether Lewis. Julia lived with Clark in the then-frontier town of St. Louis until her early death in 1820. She offers a foil for the poet’s first-person Montana narrative and enriches the historical perspective of the poetry, providing a female voice to counterbalance the often male-centered discovery and frontier narrative.
 
The collection shines with all-too human moments of levity, tragedy, and beauty such as when Clark names a river Judith after his future wife, not knowing that everyone calls her Julia, or when the poet on a hike to Goldbug Hot Springs imagines a mercury-poisoned Lewis waking “with the dawn between his teeth.”  Williamson turns a curious and critical eye on the motives and impact of expansionism, unpacking some of the darker ramifications of American hunger for land and resources. These poems combine breathtaking natural beauty with backbreaking human labor, all in the search for something that approaches grace.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809337477
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	10/03/2019
Series:	Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	94
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Corrie Williamson is a poet and teacher in Montana. Her first book, Sweet Husk, won the 2014 Perugia Press Prize. She has been nominated twice for the anthology Best New Poets and received the James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry from the journal Shenandoah. Her poems have appeared in TriQuarterly, West Branch, AGNI, and the Missouri Review, among others.

Read an Excerpt

HAY CUTTING

Fincastle, Virginia, 1803

The sky is just as I imagine
an ocean, vast & unmarred
by cloud. I have yet to learn
to walk among the seedheads
knowing with my palms
their story of moisture,
of readiness. The dew
whisked off now into light,
the reapers gather
at the edges of the grass,
having spent the morning
snarling their blades against
grindstones in a flurry
of deadly sparks. They move
together across the rows,
blurring in the heat,
their scythes like a flock of steel
birds released from the field.

BREAD ALONE

Having accidentally thrown out their decade-old sourdough culture,
the bakers at Park Avenue come to my friend Nick at the Sweet
Grass & ask, can he find it in his heart to share a dollop of starter
with them, but though he is kind about it, though he says, ask me
for sugar, for flour, for honey brewed by bees from high mountain
meadows beyond the valley, no, he cannot give them a bit of the
batter that dwells in a plastic bucket by his rusty ovens, birthed 150
years ago in the windy darkness of a kitchen in Great Falls at the
hands of a Scotch sheepherder plying yeast with water, with wheat
that bloomed & died in the surrounding plains, risen from the wild,
the dough a thing with breath, souring into a richness he feeds, &
folds, hungrily alive in his long freckled hands, like the voice
blazing in a coal worn in a bag below the throat, talisman & torch,
the voice that gives the price for day-old bread, the voice vowing
the simple, leavening power of its love, the voice of some god
howling year after year among the trees.


BRINGING HOME THE BULL

Fincastle, 1806

He follows, docile furnace
of red hide & horn.
The wheels of his hooves

clobber stones. Father
carries only a bucket,
swinging from his elbow

for the miles he drove
the monster with neither
lead nor hook. What

a trap for a vast heart,
for hot rivers of blood
beneath the twitching

rusty coat, under
the creasing knees &
rolling haunch, the velvet

sack of his underbelly.
Hide is flesh, & also
my first instinct.

But no, I'm no child,
& coursing in me this
need: to come to him

steady, find that heat echoed
in my wrists, between us
all sinew, flame, & thew.


APRIL & THE IRON-EATERS

Berkeley Pit: Butte

Should we call the snow geese foolish
for not having known that the green lake

amidst the yellow rock where the waters
of the nation divide was in fact a pit of poison

more acidic than a can of Coke? Perhaps.
Though let's not blame them, especially the ones

that perished, floated like sacked pillows
on the still surface or sank bottomward

a thousand feet down, toward the gleaming
arsenic, sulfide still sputtering from mineshafts

like a toxic starfield without the light of fusion.
Now, fireworks & loudspeakers warn migrators:

Move on, there is no birth, no shelter, no solace
here. Except of course for the extremophiles

repairing in the earth's harsh dark their own
haggard DNA, among them Euglena mutabilis,

which pulls ore from the water to store within
its single cell, then belches air. Ghostly

metal-belly, bizarre homemaker, that as it swims
is forging of waste its version of spring.


IN THE DIVORCE, PATRICIA GOT THE MAMMOTH BONE

She takes it from
the mantel: ulna,
skeletal wedge
mapped with hairline
cracks, & offers
me the bare
billow of its weight,
creeklike scrapes
in the bone where
Alaskan ground squirrels
gnawed toward
the marrow.
We run our palms
over it, consider
setting our teeth
to its edge, imagine
scavengers scattering
when along came
something bigger.
Hunger's warm
rhythm is here in
the white scar
of seeking, of fang
on bone our fingers
trace, ghost-tonguing
this path, this past,
its precious fracture.

Table of Contents

Hay Cutting 1

I Montana

52 Hertz 5

The Pleasuring Ground, or This Week in Animal News 6

Gates of the Mountains 7

The Valley of a Thousand Haystacks 9

At the Farmers Union's Women's Conference … 10

Butte Tango 12

Vultures: Collective Noun 13

Hiking to Goldbug Hot Springs, I Consider… 14

Bread Alone 15

Double Ekphrastic: Charles Willson Peale's… 16

II Virginia, 1804-1808

Chestnut Sabbath 21

Waiting to Ride 22

Science Lesson 23

Bringing Home the Bull 24

Completion of the Jackson Ferry Shot Tower 25

Field Clearing, after the Wedding 26

Hawk Moth 27

III Montana

Mastodon 31

April & the Iron-Eaters 32

Love Song of the Barred Owl 33

Ode to the Come-Along 34

Know You from Adam 36

Endless Forms Most Beautiful 37

In the Divorce, Patricia Got the Mammoth Bone 38

Mantis 39

Strange Things the Animals Do 40

Winter in Montana: Lewis's List 41

IV Saint Louis, Missouri, 1808-1818

A Tour of the Elm Street Office of the Missouri Gazette … 45

On the Death of Meriwether Lewis 47

The River Where You Forgot My Name 48

Unrest: Addressing the Great Comet 49

Leap Year & the New Madrid Earthquakes 50

Lullaby for Jean Baptiste 51

Hymn to Distance 52

The Coming of the Zebulon M. Pike… 53

Teaching Meriwether the Piano 54

Dead Reckoning 55

On the Cancer 56

V Montana

Still Life with Copper Creek & the Unabomber 59

Anti-Ars Poetica 61

Arrow Marks Spot Where His Dash to a Terrible Ending Occurred 62

This Is Your Love Poem, Al 63

A Bird in the Hand 64

Tracing It: On the Death of Meriwether Lewis 65

Hatch 66

Maybe I Should Eat That 67

The Air Gun & the Stuffed Pony 68

Post

Blessed Are Those Who Dwell in Your House 73

A Prayer in Closing 74

Notes 77

Acknowledgments 79

Editorial Reviews

What do thousands of snow geese perishing in the toxic waters of the Berkeley Pit have to do with Julia Hancock Clark teaching her son piano at the edge of the wilderness? They have been routed through the vision, imagination, and verbal ingenuity of Corrie Williamson, wherein they became her remarkable art, this brilliant book of poems.”—Robert Wrigley, author of Box

“There is something private in these carefully wrought poems, not confession but intimacy. We sit within a small circle of light and listen to Williamson’s unhurried voice as it tells us, 'Hush now, all / will be revealed'” Which is how we must dwell on this earth, too—with patience and a sense of time’s great arc and return. I’m grateful for the echoing music made in the space between present and past.”—Keetje Kuipers, author of All Its Charms

“We have to imagine we belong to a place. We must also live knowing we are bound to our human history, as complex, beautiful, and tragic as it may be. Girded with such knowledge, we live with greater purpose and may begin to imagine our future that we may work to preserve it. These are a few of the larger notions this fine book prompts, but the broad strokes are stippled with the intimacy of natural detail and the human passion that springs from it. The result is a rich and absorbing book of poetry.”—Maurice Manning, author of One Man's Dark

 

“‘For what stirrings / am I attuned?’ asks Corrie Williamson in this potent, questing second collection. Here, in these sound-rich poems, Williamson shows us just how wild the world still is, despite the losses. How weird. How beautifully unknown. From bacteria that is ‘forging of waste its version of spring’ in the tailing pits of old mines to the glories of the come-along, that most miraculous of tools which lets us heft impossible weights—somewhat like a poem in Williamson’s skilled hands."—Elizabeth Bradfield, author of Toward Antarctica

From the Publisher