RIVER PRETTY

by Kate Murr


For Jane Hoogestraat and Mary Ruefle

Up from the river came my teacher 
with her manila envelope and forward stride, 
Look here you’re from here look
what’s this kind of fish, she said thrusting
the envelope at me. It was half full, I saw, of 
found scales, gray, some half-dark, some sheer iridescence—
scales round and scraped off whole. What I imagined
she imagined was these were from some 
strange mid-country fish with a good name. I know 
why a person’d want to put scales in an envelope 
from the gravel bar, why she’d even want to pick up,
too, a spine still cleaving to a fraying tail, more like 
a wing so that the found thing registers as, “bird mummy,”
but also a fish spine, some wonder of anatomical glue 
stronger than spring air holding it all together—
know, because I’ve done this picking up, too. My departed 
teacher wrote, In one tradition, one should not
die before having seen a thousand wonders.
What you have in your envelope is sucker scales,
is my best guess, is what I said. Sucker? Yes, ugly-lipped
scavengers, river bottom feeders good for gigging
with a spear at night and feeding lots of people at a fish fry.
You score them real good with a filet knife to break
the bones and toss them in cornmeal and fry them, they’re 
excellent. A white fish? Yes. Maybe the scales 
are from a white bass or a bluegill or something—
I would like to say a bluegill, she says, interrupting (she said earlier
Let it in as much as you can), and I said, I think bluegill
scales would be smaller and darker, but there is
a sucker, brown and lovely, we call “hogmolly.” 
That would be good, maybe, but these scales aren’t from 
an actual hogmolly. And she was on. And that nameless
fish flash gone gray gone to sky maybe to mind
got packed up by the poet and it flew away 
from the Ozarks—just wherever that fish got.





Kate Brady (Murr) writes from the Ozarks. She earned an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson. She loves rivers. Her poems have appeared in albums, museums, bars, churches, farms, main streets, festivals, weddings, funerals, and various literary journals, including Guesthouse, Midwest Review, Scoundrel Time, and others. Her manuscript about Baldknobbers and vigilante art was a finalist at Tupelo Press.