Pre-Colonial Marietta Trail

Lyrics

Before the name Marietta.
Before the iron rail.
There was the trace.

A depression in the red clay,
trodden hard by seasons.
North from the Chattahoochee confluence,
north toward the Etowah mounds.
The smell of crushed pine needles underfoot in August.
The sound of distant water over rock.
A path worn by purpose,
not by accident.
The path itself, the only map required.

This is a reading of the ground before the street.
A line of memory pressed into the soil.
It begins at Standing Peachtree,
a village name on a stranger's paper,
but here, it was just the way home.
The way north.

The record opens late.
A British survey map, 1782,
notes "Indian Trail."
A line sketched in ink, abstracting the footfalls.
The Treaty of Indian Springs, 1821,
cedes the ground beneath the path.
The paper documents an ending,
not a beginning.
It measures what is about to be erased.

This is a reading of the ground before the street.
A line of memory pressed into the soil.
It begins at Standing Peachtree,
a village name on a stranger's paper,
but here, it was just the way home.
The way north.

Archaeological test pits along the corridor
yield the shells of river mussels.
Carried as portable food.
Discarded by the trailside.
A meal eaten on a journey we cannot reconstruct.
The ledgers do not name the Mvskoke women
who tended the camps.
The transcriptions omit the children
who gathered these shells from the riverbed.
Their hands are not in the archive.
Only the dust and the shells remain.

The dust settles.
The path waits for the pavement.
The trace is still here.
Underneath.