The Poetry plate. Relief from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers and lakes from USGS NHD; watersheds from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset; roads and city limits from Census TIGER 2024.
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Poetry’s center stands about 550 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 480 ft to 590 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Kemp clay and Corsicana Marl, undivided, from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Clay. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Clay, sand. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale.
Heights from Copernicus GLO-90 (a surface model: it includes buildings and tree canopy); summits from USGS GNIS; rivers from USGS NHDPlus HR; rock from the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation.
A raindrop that lands in Poetry reaches the Gulf of America by way of Dry Creek, the South Fork Sabine and the Sabine: about 500 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Toledo Bend Reservoir, Sabine Lake and Lake Tawakoni.
240 miles of the trip are on the Sabine.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Poetry; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
