South Riverside Drive, St. Paul, Pastel, by John Cummings
Creek Water
Your naked ankles ache, not yet numb
from the high-country snowmelt flow.
At your feet, pebbles gleam
the pure colors of the earth.
Upstream, the canyon climbs
toward ice, the creek’s weeping point.
On the way down, the channel
cuts through basalt walls,
stands of tamarack and pine.
The last flood torpedoed
a thousand trees downstream,
depositing tangles of stumps and roots,
logs tossed by forces hard to fathom,
tumbled helter-skelter, some charred
by the big fire a few years ago;
thus, the dismal blackened hills.
Bleached as bones, toppled cottonwoods
crisscross the creek to form pools
where native rainbows curve in shade.
The current glides, glassy, wavy.
You could gaze forever at its waver,
admire sunlit stones, and would do so
if not for December snow deep enough
to bury your car with you inside.
You marvel at car-sized boulders
swept for miles by a more ancient flood,
come to rest in the placid stream
on a meadow of camas and lupine,
its grasses nested in by the shrill killdeer,
browsed by ten-thousand years of elk.
There’s not a breath of wind
to hint at that distant cataclysm,
the sledge crack of rock on rock.
You love to wade in natural history,
breathe air laced with pine pitch.
You even love the mild pain of pebbles
not much larger than marbles underfoot.
You wince with every mincing step.
Most of all you love the patter
of creek water, its clicks and sighs,
plumed patterns curled around your calves
in a deeper pool. You know why you love,
still, to come here, why you tear off
your boots, your dusty, sweaty socks.
You come for orange lichens on basalt,
for one glimpse of a mountain bluebird.
You come for clarity, to stand in the cold
light of the creek and be washed of grief.
________________
Edward Harkness
Review by Kathryn de Leon
I enjoyed reading this poem, it takes me back to my days of hiking in Sequoia National Park, mostly in the 80s and into the 90s. The speaker appears to be alone, as I always was when I hiked through the mountains; when one is alone in the mountains, with no voices, no sounds of traffic, only the sound of wind in the trees, and the “patter,” “click and sighs” of the creek. I must say that I was never brave enough to wade in the icy water of a mountain creek!