Cisterns
by Jared Carter
Cisterns
We live at the continent’s center, a thousand miles from the sea,
yet there are five enormous lakes from which the sun takes up water
and lowers it again each spring, in waves of rain, making the fields green —
lakes that graze at the heart of the land like a great elk with outspread antlers.
And there are rivers, too, long arteries of smooth and tranquil motion
gradually merging, becoming still larger, connecting, replenishing.
All of this was sleeping once, alongside the prairies, and beneath the limbs
of hardwood forests. All of this was crossed with trails still discernible,
After rain, when the old trees show marks that were blazed in their bark.
The earliest people who lived here knew the rain well, and honored it,
and gave it special names. Those who came after them broke the earth,
and planted fields and orchards, and thought of rain as their companion.
Yet for all of them, ancestral peoples and newcomers, there were times
when no rain fell, and the summers were interminable and scorching
and hard. Gradually, those who settled here learned how to build cisterns
out of stone or brick, that caught the rain, and stored it underground.
Such building became a craft, a skill of masons and farmers, smiths
and tinkers. Brief summer showers, falling on the houses, collected
and found refuge in the cisterns. It was soft water, in which my great aunt
washed her hair, and it was clear, sweet water my grandfather hoisted up
In a metal pail and carried to the trough for his horse. There was a cistern
in the back yard of every house, as you went down the street, and cisterns
in the country, out on the farms. But there were wells, too, and pumps,
and gradually the cisterns were no longer needed, and were abandoned,
Their mounds grown up with knotweed, their circular openings covered
with slabs of limestone, and these in turn obscured by vines and creepers.
In time, lowered into the thousands of abandoned cisterns that survived,
people began to deposit things they no longer wanted, that were old now,
And worn out. Some they were even ashamed of. Their grown children
laughed at them for keeping coal-oil lanterns, and washboards, and collars
for horses, and other odd things hung up on pegs at the back of the barn.
So they went out by themselves, in the twilight, and slid the covers aside,
And dropped these parts and pieces of their lives down into the darkness.
I know, for I have rolled back such stones, expecting to see my reflection
gazing up at me, and have instead looked into the forgotten history
of these people, as it was written in broken crocks and rusted tin-snips,
As it was inscribed in layers of knives and forks from the Five-and-Dime,
and pale green pitchers won in shooting arcades. It is a world of things
broken and bent and chipped, and piled up in gradual layers and forgotten,
until the cistern itself has been forgotten, and filled with still more leaves
And ashes, and grass clippings from the yard. The stone cover is buried
when the property is landscaped, and finally it seems as if the cisterns
had never existed, never been there in the first place. Lost in this way,
they have become a world of things unknowable, objects left behind,
And yet I know they are still there, even though I cannot see them,
for I can feel them sometimes, under my feet, the way you can sense
passageways left by moles, or the way you can tell, in old cemeteries,
in a place with no markers, that here the ground slopes ever so slightly —
Or perhaps you have come up on a row of bone-white tablets with names
and dates scrubbed away by sun and rain, and replaced by the script
of lichen inched across their blank faces. Something still gives testimony.
That is how I know. That is why I am confident that cisterns will endure,
How I know they have not gone away, because they cannot go away,
they are part of the land and its customs, which are never-ending,
and by now they are filled to a level immeasurably rich and lasting —
with the sounds made by your grandfather, headed for the barn, talking
To the two dogs, and your grandmother, already down in the kitchen,
making breakfast on the iron cook-stove. Parts of that same stove —
the round iron covers, the spiral handle with which she moves them about —
will be consigned to the cistern eventually, along with the butcher knife
With which she cuts the squares of cornbread, and the wavy blue glasses
into which she pours the fresh milk. All that we knew once is eligible
for the limbo of the cistern, where it will drift in the earth, and the darkness,
and wait there until a time when it is brought up again, like Lazarus,
Come to tell us at last — when it will give witness to this enduring land
with its rivers and forests, and its lakes, and the ghosts of numberless bison
still grazing its prairies. When it will tell of the people who lived here once,
and the great clouds, in the sun and the rain, and all their coming and going.
Jared Carter's most recent book of poems, The Land Itself, is from Monongahela Books in West Virginia. His Darkened Rooms of Summer: New and Selected Poems was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2014. He lives in Indiana.
The image accompanying this post is by Diane Carter.