It isn’t the immense river
but the tiny door
that draws my eye.

The Mississippi is wide and brown,
roaring as you’d expect in a flood. In Nebraska
we saw a Little League outfield fence poking
from the water. Iowa cornfields were buried
tassel-deep. Here at the Illinois border,
a few miles from the President’s
emergency visit, I see a house whose rear door
is barely three feet high.
                            It’s like a half-door
opening onto the muddy currents. The whole house
is short; backyard trees
have no bare trunk, merely burst into leaf
from their wet lower branches.

                                   Only the Mississippi
looks natural, unfurling its broad palm,
brown fingers tapping waterfront windows.