A Flood at the Head of Little Rock Creek

A Flood at the Head of Little Rock Creek

The dark veins of the mountain
Force clouds from the rocks
As the voices of cicadas beneath the earth,
Too thousand to count, exhale with 
The flood. The late greens stand before
Winter, even glowing, ever
While long waters flow.

Dark spaces shine in mist of rain,
The whole air is dense with living breath
Scoured deep in the earth
Carried down with a part of the sky.

I feel the electric pull of power
As I step down the bank
Near unreasoning force
Which neither cares nor sees,
Only moves with the world.

Beneath the waters small stones roll
Over others, breaking apart
Exhaling vapor as matter,
Resounding in the chambered streaming earth
Where deep veins are becoming 
As long water flows from the peak of Roan.

Down the stream there is destruction,
Loss and sadness. Men watch as their yards become
Strangling lakes, crushing unnatural weights
As water moves with the world, perhaps
To annihilate and return all to flow
Once again through its veins.

I watch as the stream becomes a clouded
River, forever, through the laurels,
Mossy stones, deer tracks, old bones grown young
And thinner. I pull the clean, wet life into my lungs
And imagine that all worlds are at some point the 
Same, and I am at some time without reference,
Soon to be returned to this sacred vapor.

Wherever life flows from such pure places,
It is held for a time in a strange dimension.
As I dip my hand in the stream, my burdens are
Swept to another. I see my life as it is. I am small
In the wake, frail in the current, immeasurable in the way
That all moving things waver.