VIEW OF THE MISSISSIPPI FROM FORT HILL AT VICKSBURG BATTLEFIELD NATIONAL PARK AND CEMETERY

From the wide meandering drive
you look away, beyond the lines
of white anonymous markers,
down to where the barges
are pushing past the piers,
each as slow as the hour hand of a clock,
while tiny speedboats whine
like mosquitoes as they skip up and down,
skimming the water
to better their times.

The tape-recorded tour guide at Fort Hill
makes it a point to say
that the River isn't what you see
—“the River” around here
always means the Mississippi—
but the Yazoo Diversion Canal,
an artificial waterway
created by the Army Corps of Engineers
after the River shifted away
and left Vicksburg behind.

The real Mississippi winds,
like a snake uncoiling, on the other side
of the shifting sandbars and temporary islands
that lie in the distance,
looking like solid ground
crowded with scrub-oak, cypress, willow, and pine.

Several hours further down,
at New Roads in the Parish of Pointe Coupée,
the River once twisted itself out this way.
On the Louisiana side
they made the old bed into a resort,
a playground for aquatic sports,
called False River Lake.
They have sail-boating and water-skiing there,
and trolling and fishing from the shore
lined now with substantial real estate.

It all sounds pretty dull and safe,
and perhaps it is.
Perhaps there’s a point to be made
for complacency, though: The Chinese say,
with Mandarin politesse,
“May you live in interesting times,”
—when they don’t mean to bless.

More than once the River has
struck at a town;
of that rip-roaring sinful place,
Natchez-under-the-Hill,
there isn’t much left now;
and at Grand Gulf,
half an hour south of here,
fifty-six blocks of busy, sleepy people
sloughed off into the water
bit by bit, without a sound.

Only a few minutes away,
antique and beautiful,
the clock-faced steeples of Port Gibson wait,
set back decorously not-too-near
the soft slopes of the Little Bayou Pierre,
a minor tributary that every one there
calls “By a Pier.”
They watch the town’s two bridges—
the skeletal old one, mostly sucked down
in the great storm of ’Fifty-Four,
and the squat ugly new one, that brute mass and weight
have held in place so far.
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Photo from http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-most-powerful-rivers-in-the-world.php