One Poem by Todd Davis

Logjam on Lookout Creek

The country in ruins, rivers and mountains
continue.
                                               — Tu Fu

 
I sit on 1500 years snagged
              by its collective weight, by the downward pull
of this valley, and the simple force of water
              when it meets snowmelt and rain.
How long these logs will stay is anyone’s guess.
              Stoneflies have hatched in this place of rest,
time-tempered, bent and slowed by the sound
              of creek bumping against pushed up gravel:
a change of structure bending,
              the plummeting of water slackened, guided
and gilded by slivers of light etched
              with hemlock needles and fir boughs,
with a shadow-show of alder cones reformed
              into a pool of the coldest clarity.
If you pick up part of this river,
              turn over a stone, you’ll find it’s connected
to everything else—pupa caddis and cutthroat,
              sculpin and rough-skinned newt. The very trees
whose crowns rise higher than I can see. Some
              will come crashing in hundred-year floods;
others—after feeding pileateds and beetles—
              will lie down to fashion failed dams
that change the course, current
              diverted, carrying part of these mountains
on toward the cities of our ruins.