Overland Flow
The hill failed, in the rain
and blocked up the pipe under the road
—a twenty-four inch pipe, which should have been overkill—
jumbled silt and rock and large woody debris
all ponded up there, until it wasn’t,
until it burst, across the road, cut the bank, scoured out the ditch
three feet deep, stratified into horizons
organic, musty, and mineral,
rushed fast down a few thousand years
until it burst, a slurry of stone and swift water,
gray glacial till spread six inches deep through the stand,
swept up against the stems of hemlocks,
shredded sword ferns into dirty lace,
ground away mosses and stranded sticks in drifts
along shores that never were, before Monday;
scoured the creek out of its banks
and cut a new one eighty feet south,
already two feet deep.
Craig says he’d never seen anything like it
and he’s been in the woods since I was three.
It’s as well we didn’t put in that spur road, we agree,
it’s as well we haven’t sold the trees.
Sara E. Palmer is an archaeologist with the State of Washington. Her poetry was recently reviewed as “conversational and aloof, sharp and personal,” which is about what she’s like, too. She lives in the woods and keeps a house full of books, children, and animals in Olympia.
Header photo by Pexels, courtesy Pixabay.
