Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Dara Wier’s "The Batture" is a meditation on impermanence, disappearance, and the uneasy relationship between nature and human intervention. A batture, the strip of land between a river’s low-water mark and its levee, becomes the poem’s primary setting—a liminal space between water and land, presence and absence, certainty and speculation. The poem unfolds in quiet, restrained observation, yet beneath its surface runs a powerful current of tension, one that grapples with the mystery of loss and the inevitability of time’s erosion.

The opening lines immediately establish the batture’s instability: "The batture’s water and sand disappear / when water swells the river, / heat’s portion of a northern winter." The river is not a passive presence but a force capable of swallowing the land, a reminder that what appears solid is always vulnerable to change. The seasonal shift from winter to heat is not one of renewal but of engulfment, suggesting a cyclical, almost indifferent process. The willows—"cropped up / since our last cow is dead / and carried to the batture / to be taken by the water / clean into another season"—are at once markers of time and symbols of nature’s quiet persistence, growing where decay and erasure have already occurred.

The poem’s central image of waiting for a swollen body to surface brings a macabre stillness to the scene. The speakers—whether a collective or a singular consciousness—observe the water with an almost detached expectancy: "We don’t say so but we wait / for the swollen body / to appear before us." The phrasing suggests an unspoken but shared understanding that the river does not simply take—it eventually gives back, its depths yielding what was lost. The desire for distraction—"the torn leg to distract us, / the loose arm to show us where"—betrays an unsettling need for the grotesque to confirm what has already been assumed.

Yet this is not merely an exercise in grim fascination. The speakers recognize themselves as participants in a broader human narrative, one that involves loss, search, and the need for closure. They acknowledge their role in "a series of related events / which will end we hope in the family’s / satisfaction with the coroner’s / identification." This recognition adds a layer of moral weight to their watching; they are not mere spectators but potential bearers of knowledge, capable of offering the final word to the grieving. The mention of pennies pressed onto the eyelids of the dead, though "old-fashioned / and no longer done in this country," is a haunting image of ritual and reverence, tying the drowned man to an ancient tradition meant to secure safe passage to the afterlife.

Wier introduces a second narrative thread in the middle of the poem—an absent man from "southern Minnesota," whose "closet of dry-cleaned suits" and "mahogany high-boy of ironed shirts" become eerie relics of a life interrupted. The detail of "the coins he left / without thinking" suggests a quiet, nearly invisible departure, hinting at the possibility that his disappearance was intentional. This section reframes the poem’s concerns: loss is not always sudden or violent; sometimes, it is deliberate, a slow erosion rather than an abrupt vanishing.

The final lines return to the batture, where time is not just observed but "watched." There is an underlying yearning for intervention—"We hope calls us / come across and save us." The red flag across the water is both literal and metaphorical, a signal of distress or warning, yet it remains out of reach. The phrase "this is twenty-eight states" expands the batture beyond a single geographic location, suggesting that this liminal space—where the lost drift, where time moves in water’s rhythm—is not confined to one riverbank but exists as a condition everywhere.

In "The Batture," Wier crafts a meditation on the ways in which water, memory, and human lives intersect. The poem does not offer resolution—no body is ultimately identified, no closure definitively reached—but it does frame loss as an inevitable current, one that does not stop moving even when we stand on its banks, waiting.

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