I hear it whistle at Indian Creek Bridge.
I cannot sleep for fish dreams,
glittering smolt like tears on a stringer.
You stepped across pools sailed with golden leaves
each rock a metronome for years clouded
over a creekflow of small wishes,
your reflection sunken like colored stones.
If I were to angle this hole alone, would Fall be mirrored there?
Or the reflection of hard blue sky unbroken by your snaking flyline?
At breakfast, you reached across this table
to open my starving fists
and placed a gasping cutthroat in my left palm
a story in my right.
Brilliant fish flutter in my throat
slippery prey with secret voices.
When we were young, you and I collected treasures
from a crush of sand and stood at the flood’s high line
to shorecomb the wasted—by afternoon, the true nuggets
had slipped out through the gaps in the wicker creel.
Bootsoles separate each step from cold sand grained from bones
into a long shore where storms treat nothing kindly.
Fishermen are superstitious of their souls
if something that sings is netted.
I dip the net into the pool
but can only catch my face.
Darkfall drapes the prairie like a shawl. My voice cannot walk
Indian Creek alone, my fingers cannot rewind the unspooled line.
Winner in the 2018 Oregon Poetry Association’s annual spring Poet’s Choice Competition
Published in “Verseweavers” 23/2018 Spring OPA
2013 Boise State University President’s Writing Award, Poetry, 2nd Place
