Mudlark No. 47 (2012)

Most Things Just Haven’t Worked Out

It’s in the mud, in the way the mud weaves itself around your 
ankles, the way it weaves itself around your ankles and it’s as if 
you’ve never been nowhere before, never been nowhere and never 
will again. Most things just haven’t worked out. The mud 
remembers the muds before. The shuffle of clay creek into a 
choked mill race and last forest lost, to the islanding, an islanding 
of the old time and the history of how a cay went from where.

To get to the go to the getting then to gone then finally to go and 
get there. From puddled, to a ponding, to where the hell how. In 
the woods out past the old water wheel you stagger inside a broke- 
down shotgun shack and take a last look around. They will bury 
you here, your body wrapped in a blue sod suit studded with 
whalebone buttons and a piece of flint in the fist of each hand, in 
the mud, the memory of mud, the muds holding the old-times-all.

Jeffrey Little | Because In Mapping Becomes Them
Contents | Mudlark No. 47 (2012)