The path of most insistence Constrains the creek Where it spools And rummages through Its darkest secrets And the mooncolored trout revolve. If it's been a long time coming It'll be a long time gone. Or so I think, watching it Neither hurry nor tarry Through spills and basins I used to climb among With a fly rod between my teeth, And may again If life is long. Now I'm content to idle The truck on the bridge As the pines offer Their shadows to water. I can still remember A few things. The years I wasted fishing Down here. Cold rock under fingertips And the smell of willow early. The lapidary green Of the little snake Who swims like water in water. The sun getting hotter On my shoulders, My feet in the current Going numb. Once I stood on the canyon rim And hurled boulders One after another down, To boom and ricochet, To make the shadows speak. There was no one anywhere To hear the canyon's utterance Or how the quiet rushed back hard When I stopped, My loneliness complete, The smell of gunpowder In the air. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.cc.press.org | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...AUGUST MOONRISE by SARA TEASDALE BY THE FIRESIDE by ROBERT BROWNING ASPATIA'S SONG, FR. THE MAID'S TRAEGDY by JOHN FLETCHER THE BIGLOW PAPERS: 6. THE PIOUS EDITOR'S CREED by JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL SHADOWS OF RECOLLECTION by WILLIAM EDMONSTOUNE AYTOUN COLONIZATION OF AFRICA by JOHN GARDINER CALKINS BRAINARD AURORA LEIGH: BOOK 1 by ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING OBSERVATIONS IN THE ART OF ENGLISH POESY: 22. ELEGIAC VERSE: THE FIFTH EPIGRAM by THOMAS CAMPION |