by Sandy Longhorn

    — Lower White River Museum State Park

Once, they bent and raked
the mussel beds with hands
gone to cracking from exposure.

Fat mucket, pistolgrip,
purple wartyback, fragile
papershell, rock pocketbook.

They went in search of pearls,
wading in the shallows,
they bent to trouble the water

and felt an ache in their bones,
ache that must have mirrored
the mussel’s shock, wrenched

open above the hinge. White
iridescent nacre splayed
in heaps after they bent

to remove the meat, to search
for precious beads of luster.
They lusted long to sleep

in easier bodies, created
pearling rakes with a longer
reach. Then, with shallow

beds exploited, they made
crowfoot hooks and bars,
took to their flatboats to drag

the darker, deeper reaches,
until the ravaged bottoms refused
to yield any further treasure,

no matter how far they bent.

Sandy Longhorn is the author of three books of poetry: The Alchemy of My Mortal Form, The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths, and Blood Almanac. Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, North American Review, Oxford American, and elsewhere. Longhorn teaches at the University of Central Arkansas.