No sun forecast to ignite the leaves,
but a raft of clouds before the storm
Christmas Eve, an atmospheric river
to fill the creeks and streams.
In 1955, Mill Creek’s rising measured
on the hour, on the concrete
steps into the house full of kids
and stacks of unopened presents.
Cut’s Studebaker pickup towed
our ’53 Buick out of a hole,
waves of the Kaweah swamped
its headlights on the way home.
And in the center, greenheads rising
from the cattails into Sabbath skies
with no starched sermons, but instead
a winged ascension from the tailwater
pulling hard for heaven. Just white sand left
by the Kaweah after the Flood of Fifty-five.
Within a year, Dad had two hundred pairs
on pasture, pumping water every summer.
Mountains of white sand and empty pits
where the gravel miners quit pulling
the last dollar out of ground we irrigated
for thirty years, when it cost too much to dig.
Unleveled and abandoned now, nothing
left to grow but willows, cottonwoods
and blackberries so tangled and thick
that only the wild can make a living.
drycrikjournal 