Creta Mine - Painted Bride Quarterly

By Ryan Clark

for Creta, Oklahoma, no longer a town

Touch Creta wherever you want to seize a thing from out of the unfriendly earth.

This is a sound we make furious with mineral imagination, the heave of site

advertising what we love of the future, but which is just land unsuitable for farming.

Mine is a cover for rocks much like the rest but only these are mine—

this is a land that only I can open, and I will line my position with structures.

To churn a crust into use,

you must take a skin and

tear the layers through a mill,

where the word copper is processed

from unwanted versions of redness

the earth has retained. Then,

from the freshly revealed form,

make units of yield. Sell this

in a quantity that feeds

the mine you discovered

when you bought what a place is.

A town of Creta forgot to catch a feel for history, leaving nothing.

The mines opened after the wake had evened out.

This is how everything is fit to the bundle of was—not a trace of splash

but the unavoidable loss of stillness pulsing in new ways.

What left the land knew the dirt as well as the miners had.

Towns create enormous piles of knowing, of dreams

sown into everything in the dead of night.

It is not dug up and carried away.

It will not be processed.

At the mile where a body was,

I see nothing but a road-divided land.

Trucks shake through the area automatic.

Such is a repossessed story of Creta:

contained in a line just for a moment,

it drags its traces with it way out of sight.

You send pounding feels toward the sound

of its rumors and know this is over already.

No foot is large enough to drive itself

through years of dirt. Time shovels

its song deep and unaware.

Wide the pay of oil, wide the machine to drill, wide

enough to hide a blue sky in unceasing width of hope,

wide enough to force it down with eventual losses,

down where you realize you were wrong to spend

so much to take apart the deep earth.

Among the early efforts to make of Creta a way to take,

this was a faint passing through the rustling of its scrub brush.

Each of its resources refused to make productive land enough

for a town, and so miners shred their hands for awhile

and leave unused parts far more patient than money.

In a roughly peopled width of space, Creta is a sign grown into

fathers and rust-turf, mothers and wind-dress, a thought just looking

outside at the everyday the town never got to reach.

The mine is not only a word for economy and scratch,

but also the way the home hears itself in a mind.

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