Under the bank a muskrat was trembling
with meaning my hand would wear forever.
– William Stafford (“Ceremony”)
We were those days we envy now
with time to cut and paste around
the scenes that needed editing,
our thin thread stretched into a thick
lariat wrapped in purpose – yet,
we were much more consumed
in the loose meanderings of our
sweet naïveté, the unresolved knots
and tangles without ends – like
David Lee’s colloquial roll
in Barbed Wire, before ‘them pliers’ –
like Stafford’s Ceremony under the bank
in that river, our blood flows red
among the roots of things still living
along the oxbows towards our beginning.
drycrikjournal 