Creek-Song

It begins in a cow lane with bees and white clover, courses along corn, rushes accelerando against rocks. It rises to a teetering pitch as I cross a shaky tree-bridge, syncopates a riff over the dissonance of trash—derelict icebox with a missing door, mohair loveseat sinking into thistle. It winds through green adder’s mouth, faint as the bells of Holsteins heading home. Blue shadows lengthen, but the undertow of a harmony pulls me on through raspy Joe-pye-weed and staccato-barbed fence. It hums in a culvert beneath cars, then empties into a river that flows oboe-deep past Indian dance ground, waterwheel and town, past the bleached stones in the churchyard, the darkening hill.