River Dog

She stood on the unturned rocks

and paddled between lilies,

huffing each breath to expel

the water coming up from underneath.

Sycamore leaves piled down,

flaking like their mottled bark,

green and white, marbled

like her blue merle coat

shedding droplets down.

Cannonball-sized bodies

folded firmly in the rush,

the rapids telling stories

as she lingered in an eddy.

Boldly she dipped her head and paws

to hear the current speak,

a murmured secret carried

through, the yarning ocean's deep.

Settling

The speckled orange of a Marb Red filter

dangles from his lips, trusting its place there

as it has a pack a day since '06.

  If it's brown it's down he says

shifting his bulk around

under crinkling camo. Deer season's

initiation for twelve year olds and

now we are adepts at 18

  Well I ain't bout killin a doe--

a smirk, guffaws

but this late in the season,

you gotta take what you can get.

Thoreauvian Arithmetic

Simplify.³

Green River Reservoir: Canoeing Journal Excerpts

Eat all the hunger you can,

this is not a morning for a delicate breakfast.

Your lunch is moist, day-old and smaller

as the day gets high.

A kettle lake is the kind I best know, a round glacial divot fed by meltwater, underground seepage, an island of water in the vast scar of land and people, but this lake, the Green River Reservoir, is a slowed river, outwardly connected to the water around it via channels narrow and meandering; the flowage system is elongate and fanged, with many sharp inlets, coves and bays; the trees here explode unto the edge of water, only separated by a smooth crest of rock, like foliage sprouting on the shell of an enormous ancient turtle.

Lining the bottom of the cove,
as much as I have seen follows:
Newts, decaying leaves and sticks,
some kind of seaweed, old logs, a dead sunfish.


The fluid wander becomes stagnant, glacialized; we are awash in a landscape and ourselves--