Flood

Preacher's sounding

This has happened before: rain that begins

as mist-thick and windless, slow to fall.

In the bottomland, the bloated spiders

have caught fog and bound it; the webs sag, white

and wet.

The second day, the creek argues

with the rain, grows bolder before losing

itself, overcoming the banks that have

defined it. Its current cut, the water

grows still, intent on rising. This changes

everything.

The third day, the skeletal

corn-balk is lost. The trees wade in, waist-deep.

Boundaries drown-the wire dead. I have

moved the cows to higher ground, and, puzzled,

they look down on this placid other

that is not lake or pond.

The rain abates

midday, and I know the next morning I

will see the field reappear as if rising.

I will see the fenceline discovered,

and, more, some ancestral bone, white now

as a root, will appear in the storm-gore

that will gag the creek, sagging in its bed.

I will find crows, those disbelievers, drowned

in their sleep, feathers strewn in the cattails,

their mouths filled with mud.

But long before

dawn, I will be here as before, at the edge

of what cannot be sailed or sounded,

watching moonlight move over the body

of the void-depthless, black-and I will be

lost, lost as if I am in some distant place.