Wild Mary Sudik
J. Quinn Brisben
I have a hard-edged recalling
Of something that could not
Have happened: a blackish smudge
On the southernmost edge
Of the yellow-brown world,
Beyond the big cottonwood,
Beyond even the last unpaved street:
The Wild Mary Sudik, a gusher
Spewing thirty-five thousand gallons
For each of eleven black-rain days,
Droplets falling fifteen miles downwind.
But that was at least a thousand
Days before my first sure memory,
And that wild well was too far
Over the curve of the land
To be seen from the back porch
Or even from a cottonwood branch.
I must have been told of it,
Mixed it up with the burning waste
From the local refinery and the gushers
Tamed by Clark Gable in a movie
I saw when I was six, but still
Real, ineradicable, not flushed
By therapy, arising causeless,
Not evidence of anything,
Just an image, pre-literate
And provably false, but there
On the dark edge of my memory
For as long as I live.
