THAT’S HOW IT GOES
I used to remember everything that happened
plain as the love on her face. Now it mixes
and fades.
- Richard Hugo (“How Meadows Trick You”)
Sweet indulgences on the unimproved ground,
the picturesque, the rough and tough, entwined with similes,
lasting metaphors invested in the same place
that has changed a little on its own along the creek.
Was it my birthday in ’68 or ’69, twenty or twenty-one in love
with someone, or not – wet feet beneath the sycamores
walking after a wet spring, huge high-channel puddles
reflecting blue and cumulus through naked limbs – I may have
even cried, and they may have held me there
forever here, until the miners felled them? Canada
was the question, as I stole photographs to take back to school
to share, to hold before I gave that future up.
That’s how it goes along braided creeks, memories
that can be shaped and improved by lots of rain, rafts of deadfall
redirecting flows, carving faces in their cobbled banks.
Rain: .65"