Natasha Trethewey

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Vespertina Cognitio Overhead, pelicans glide in threes— their shadows across the sand dark thoughts crossing the mind. Beyond the fringe of coast, shrimpers hoist their nets, weighing the harvest against the day's losses. Light waning, concentration is a lone gull circling what's thrown back. Debris weights the trawl like stones. All day, this dredging—beneath the tug of waves—rhythm of what goes out, comes back, comes back, comes back.

Providence What's left is footage: the hours before Camille, 1969—hurricane parties, palm trees leaning in the wind, fronds blown back, a woman's hair. Then after: the vacant lots, boats washed ashore, a swamp where graves had been. I recall how we huddled all night in our small house, moving between rooms, emptying pots filled with rain. The next day, our house— on its cinderblocks—seemed to float in the flooded yard: no foundation beneath us, nothing I could see tying us to the land. In the water, our reflection trembled, disappeared when I bent to touch it. Pilgrimage Here, the Mississippi carved             its mud-dark path, a graveyard for skeletons of sunken riverboats.             Here, the river changed its course, turning away from the city             as one turns, forgetting, from the past— the abandoned bluffs, land sloping up             above the river's bend—where now the Yazoo fills the Mississippi's empty bed.             Here, the dead stand up in stone, white marble, on Confederate Avenue. I stand             on ground once hollowed by a web of caves; they must have seemed like catacombs,             in 1863, to the woman sitting in her parlor, candlelit, underground. I can see her             listening to shells explode, writing herself into history, asking what is to become of all the living things in this place? This whole city is a grave. Every spring—             Pilgrimage—the living come to mingle with the dead, brush against their cold shoulders             in the long hallways, listen all night to their silence and indifference, relive             their dying on the green battlefield. At the museum, we marvel at their clothes—             preserved under glass—so much smaller than our own, as if those who wore them             were only children. We sleep in their beds, the old mansions hunkered on the bluffs, draped             in flowers—funereal—a blur of petals against the river's gray.             The brochure in my room calls this living history. The brass plate on the door reads             Prissy's Room. A window frames the river's crawl toward the Gulf. In my dream,             the ghost of history lies down beside me, rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm. Theories of time and space You can get there from here, though there’s no going home. Everywhere you go will be somewhere you’ve never been. Try this: head south on Mississippi 49, one- by-one mile markers ticking off another minute of your life. Follow this to its natural conclusion – dead end at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches in a sky threatening rain. Cross over the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand dumped on a mangrove swamp – buried terrain of the past. Bring only what you must carry – tome of memory its random blank pages. On the dock where you board the boat for Ship Island, someone will take your picture: the photograph – who you were – will be waiting when you return