Creekward

Couple beers and cornpone in a tote, trotting downhill.

Though a mown corridor, ragweed-walled and yarrow, well-poisoned with ivy.

Past the persimmon and the osage orange, fruit un-bletted, littering grass.

Never did find elderberries this year, though I marked the white froth

of blossoms, lost amid the sumac. Avoiding beggar lice, I hope -- 

but stop to pick weed jism from jeans. Autumn is the hopeful season,

laying down seed against the night.

Soon, the fallen tree, still rooted and green, railroad tie propped against,

spanning the creek. No company but the barbed wire and the cries of birds

that I never learned.

Bitter beer --just enough to blunt the mad ache of my moments, for a span,

divested of family and fatherhood, the others scattered to see uncle and cousins, 

mamaw in her nursing home.

And, cowardly, I'm here, thinking of St. John of the Cross and wondering,

when the dawn? 

Impatiently crossing the creek into greenness, scuffing the dry bed, 

looking for rocks, to my right water flowing through a years-new

bed. Time digs new channels, whatever your wish. Find something

many-chambered, pock like slag or limestone. Will pour vinegar on it,

when I get back to the house to see.

Never learned the names of this bracken -- was late to the lore of the green

and growing. White aphids float, skeeters whine, but I no more feel them

than the eyes of god.

Papaws surrounding me, fruit gone. Was too late this year for more than a couple,

left rotting in the fridge. Carrion flies pollinate them, darkly amusing

to ponder.

Up-channel, crossing the cattle-marred flow, remembering prouder waters and

clear. Barriers of branches and barbed wire, the sound of the passing harsh

against dessicated leaves, dryly rotting.

Railroad rightward, across the fence and through the new growth. They poison

the lushness, some years. Used to find passiflora incarnata there, groundcherries

further up the line.

Am looking at the middens now. There is an abrupt threshold of earth to sinister,

leprous with glass and porcelain, old tin. Everything flows, Heraclitus might say,

refuse swimming through earth. Bending to something white and jagged, I pour

an involuntary libation to the small gods of this liminal place.

There is no lesson here, no stillness. I crave what I have always craved, 

and it not here.