The Human
by Aaron Brown
We’re good at them, in Texas, these artificial lakes—
unearthing farmland, razing pines, laying a bed of rock
to let a heavenful of rain fill the gouged earth until the lakes
become almost beautiful, almost naturally occurring, like Caddo
and its thirty thousand acres of cypress marsh. We’re good at artifice
in Texas, calling it natural, calling it wild and a best kept secret.
We’re good at dumping hundreds of fish into water
ahead of fish season so that the lake is stocked.
We’re good at numbering how many hogs to cull, how many deer
points to track down and blast so that the farm dogs yowl
day and night, disturbed, because of the bullets flying in the distance.
They know more than we know, these dogs. They know, for example,
how the lakes, despite the humans, have attracted their own life
beyond artifice. How a whole alternate history began perhaps
ten or twenty years from when the water was dug, the trees
thickly rooted now, the scars of earth sealed, the highway
only a distant noise, when one by one, the wild came in:
coyote family, fox den, occasional trace of skunk haunting
the two-lane road. The lake turtles dip their heads below the surface
to come up to more houses built along the bank, and the blue herons,
the blue herons, that clutch boat docks, glean the grasses along the bulwark,
raise their regal heads, before they skim the water to the opposite side,
the side yet to be developed, the swamp end, where they say
even the bald eagle lives, swoops low at seven for those who are awake.
Aaron Brown is the author most recently of Call Me Exile (SFASU Press 2022). He has published work in Image, World Literature Today, Waxwing, and Transition, among others. Brown grew up in Chad and now lives in Texas, where he teaches at LeTourneau University.
