The place has changed
where water pooled,
ringed by cattails
at the end
of irrigated pastures
long gone brown
for rock and gravel
royalties that boomed
before the bust.
How many times
have those Mallards
risen in my mind?
My father’s words
on a Sabbath saved
from Sunday School,
an ascension
beyond religion
dripping from clouds.
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 