No neighbor’s surprised Stone Creek
is threading the needle’s eye of August
aridity. As for weeks, parched cirrus
gauge the sky’s depth, rain’s delay:
minnows trapped in shrinking puddles
probe edges, catch the colors
of the pebbles, crawstone oddities
littering the shambling creek bed
—quarters in banked spits, pennies
brimming wishing pools. Could a trickle’s
persistent drollery planish
their dented disks? I pick one,
a wet, hard smoothness. Brown-milky
seepage soon heals the scar.
Uninteresting, a drab wart-gray,
it denies my reflection, the drought
that strands it, even—a fossil
of blue Devonian bays, white beaches
kilned to bedrock, now resuming its
nature as sand. I toss it—clack!—
scan the creek. As if thrown years,
it’s vanished down this tributary
of things going unnoticed, to surface
randomly as a childhood memory
polished smoother. Could Stone Creek
erode them all? How?—Wet pebbles sprawl
under glazing sun, each a shape
partly resistance but mostly
acquiescence, like a mind’s
travel from rough to rounder.
