“Eureka”
by Joshua G. Kiernan

Eureka was one of three towns in the Catskills reclaimed and destroyed in the 1940s to make way for the construction of the Rondout Reservoir, built to satisfy the growing demand for water from New York City.

Eureka was a town
crucified for a city
Reclaimed for the Rondout
and buried in the flood
there's no trace of it‎ now
not even a chimney for a periscope.
But I imagine it.

I imagine its clapboard houses
and the stone grey gristmill
with its water wheel licking the creek.
The farm boys tapped maple for the sugar house
and the old wooden bridge creaked
hauling lumber and hay on its back,
and the moonlighting blacksmith
who pulled teeth for a quarter. ‎

I imagine its sounds,
the whistle of Wood Thrush and Warbler
the crunch of the Autumn leaves,
how Fall makes a grave for itself‎,
and the crackle of burning wood
In the reincarnation of Winter.

I imagine a spring
emerging from a womb
of mountainous rock,
the birth pangs of a river‎.
I imagine the sound
of two brooks merging into one
and the ritual of ferns along its bank
and the hawk's call
that echoes in the valley
like rippling water, these songs of the Catskills.

I imagine its meadows
of Queen Anne's Lace and Meadowsweet.
I imagine reading Whitman by the fire
and Supper talk about ‎fly fishing
and planting corn sweet as molasses.

I see old relatives
in the soft light of Summer’s end
sitting around the long table
a ‎blueberry pie at its center.
We circled it like the sun
with each slice cut
it looked more like the moon
until there was darkness.
I scraped the bottom for moon rocks.

I imagine my days of cowboys and Indians
ducking under ‎the stone wall
that marked our turf,
jumping from rafters ‎onto stacked hay
in the red barn of my youth,
I was once a snow-drift stuntman
sledding down the happy hills
of Lackawack and Sugarloaf.

The table is empty now
the old and young dead or dispersed
across oceans of urban isolation,
but the memories linger
preserved in my mother's jam jars. ‎

I stand in awe at the changing leaves
the earth's terrestrial rainbow‎
that cover the hills
like the rolling waves of a clapboard sea,
the Catskills slumber under heaven's quilt.

I stand on the shore of the Reservoir
ankle deep in mud and mulch,
trees shedding their golden leaves
to bear their winter coat.
Memories whisper from the forest
Eureka sleeps with the legends.

I wonder, was there a church
was there a graveyard ‎in Eureka
with its residents now twice-buried?
Did they move the dead with the living?

And what of the trees -
birch, maple, oak‎ and beech
were they sacrificed in the fire?
And what of the white-tailed deer
Did they raise their white flag?

We used to fly-fish the Beaverkill
and Biscuit Brook by McKenley Hollow‎.
Now I fish for lost Eureka
my Atlantis, ‎the Jesus of towns
hanging on its soggy cross
lamented by willows.

The storm stirs up the sediment
of trapped memory,
the Brookies and Browns
breach at dawn and dusk
only to return to the deep
where memories fade
until they become fish bones.

I don't know if this sacrificial town
was like my vision of Utopia.
But I imagine it so.