drycrikjournal

                                    With history.
                                    It’s quiet here.
                                            – James Galvin (“Little Anthem”)

We need not name the places, but
to jog the memory where my spring box lid
of two-by-eights and twenty penny nails

fit roughly against more mortar and rock
to keep the leaves out of a cool, dark cave—
but not the rattlesnakes. The lid and rock

are gone, like the Pohots, small pond below
now for the livestock. Not the spring
with the galvanized tank plumbed to missing

little houses wallpapered with newspaper
and glossy, 1940 detective mags—beneath
a Live Oak, it always had a longer name.

Missing from the bunch of sixty,
somewhere off to herself to calve
for the first time, dilated weeks

before the light contractions,
tightening without notice
growing to seize her flesh.

She left sometime yesterday
to become a mother, bring him out
of the trees and rocks, moving

slowly, stopping to let him suck,
then meander across the cobbles
of the creek bed pausing

while he caught up to the shadows
of oaks and sycamores. Now
a perfect, black white-faced cow.

I was fishing in my dream on a river,
wading thigh-high in tennis shoes and levis,
fly rod bowed, German Brown dancing on his tail.

I could not feel my toes pinched between boulders
and cobbles, nor the current, nor my knees braced
bone to bone as I cast again to catch a rainbow.

Fat hungry trout on a gray river, round rocks held
in the cutbank, canopy of dogwoods, cedar and pine—
pure delight behind an old man’s eyes searching

the next riffle and eddy, reading water beneath,
moving upstream with the grace of a heron, patiently
in my sleep—a final cut edited for prime time.

A deep blue you can see
ten-feet through
from high in the Sierras,

little towns trickling down
canyons, grassy ranches
slipping into the churn

of the Valley burning
outwards, bursts of yellow
equipment on freeways

singing with truckloads
on the Delta—four lane
busyness as usual.

Perhaps erosion only
slows amid the panic
of the guilty—as the

chubby turn hungry
when all the icing on
their birthday cake is gone.

It is the same
                    long line reaching into a cutbank carved by current
                    exposing rock tangled with roots that feed a tree,

                    as if feeling were a place or like a fire that keeps
                    a home warm—words cast to float upon the surface—

                    imitations of love and life tied meticulously to draw
                    the wild from the deep and dark corners of a river.

Our communion
                    with clouds that rest upon the mountain peaks.
                    Callous hands busy with routine free the mind to fly

                    on the wings of gliding hawks that know our habits,
                    hunt the periphery of our presence and follow upstream

                    with curiosity to read our purpose, know our work—
                    as we survey our moment through their eyes.