Ted’s brother Sandy wrote this poem that integrates words and phrases derived from the Mississippi River steamboat era following a Delta Queen river cruise they took together a little over a decade ago from Chattanooga to Memphis via the Tennessee, Ohio and Mississippi rivers.
Delta Queen at Paducah, Kentucky. * Photo: Ted Scull
Steamboat Lingo — Hearing a Ghost on the Delta Queen
Captain Mary Greene cottons to the Delta Queen
like cargo cotton used to stick to hair.
Out of the main channel now, she bushwhacks
her way along phantom shores. Dead for years,
she spooks around cabin deck aft.
Acknowledged my brother Ted, as a kindred spirit,
wrapping on windows as he walked by.
We were relieved she knock knocked
back by the paddlewheel. Not
in our stateroom where she died.
A benign spirit, she saved this steamboat
from sinking. Guided a gangway guard
to a broken water pipe. But Mary’s
been known to blow her stack.
Steam cleaning her insides. Like when the bar
was expanded—broke some glasses did she.
Never high falutin mind you.
Like this Delta Queen, her stack hinged.
Humble enough to cruise under whatever
bridged her path. She’d say, “You’ve got to
bend a little to get somewhere.”
And determined, like crossing
Muscle Shoals, come hell or high
water. As a river pilot, she knew
the hell of low water was hitting
rock bottom—then you’d be singing
the blues to an Alabama moon.
Approaching Shiloh, Tennessee,
a passenger’s voice croaks through
the morning mist, “That low-flying
blue heron looks like General Sherman
after he got shot.” A stick in the mud
remark from a rebel keelboater
whose pole got stuck.
In the pilot house, I imagine Mark Twain
at the wheel. Cap cocked to one side, toothpick
in his mouth doing a slow bob as he says,
“The day was a dead and empty thing,
when steamboats left Hannibal.”
I hear ole Mary chiming in over paddles
churning. “You ain’t just fiddling around.”
A boatman’s disdain for all but the real work
that keeps “steamboats a-comin.”
The bitter end—the uncleated end
of an anchor line that pays into the river.
May it be a long time a-comin
for the Delta Queen and its elder passengers
now gathering on the sun deck to hear
the captain play the calliope, a steam organ.
Mist from the organ, the paddlewheel,
and my eye mix a Mississippi River gumbo.
The kind that keeps Mary afloat.
Note: Italicized words and phrases originated with steamboats.
Ted & Sandy Scull
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HEIDI SARNA
