Deranged Drainages

After days of rain
the spillway
is thunderous.

Revetments are designed to protect banks, but they are, sadly, under water now. A quiet day reading essays on Geography, a dozen trips to the dictionaries, twice to the encyclopedia, an inordinate amount of time looking for books I know I own but can't find. First shoots of poke, I fry with breakfast #1, they're mostly white, just a pale green on top, emerging from the ground so quickly, like what the French do with asparagus, pre-blanching. It is tender and not at all bitter. Yesterday morning, in town, I had forgotten, the smell of ramps was strong, probably wafting over the Ohio from Kentucky but maybe just Damon's cooking onions, that deep-fried flowered thing they are infamous for. An over-turned oak I stopped to examine, on a foray out to the graveyard in a lull, was a text-book Tree Tip Pit, I remembered Gretel Ehrlich's definition from "Home Ground", 'the wonderful hole a shallow-rooted tree makes when it tips over', the substrate revealed, where the sow bear might dig grubs while the cubs frolic on the bank of dirt pushed up on the downslope side. Almost everything has a name. If I had ever had a son I might have named him Tree Tip Pit, naming is important. A day like this, so many things whirl through my brain, I don't have enough bookmarks, I start using strips of paper-towel to mark particular passages. Knowing I can't keep track. Later, when I fold back the pages, they mean nothing, I remember nothing, nothing is the rule of the day. What can be folded, my relationship with you. I wander about, keeping time. The beat. I dive into a limestone cavern to discover why a limestone cave collapsed. Nothing if not local. We call things different names, depending where we live: a pone, whatever, name things; almost an internal monolog, but we spill into the common referent, whatever it's called. The natural world. Nature. What I thought I saw.

What I heard a minor bunting,
be still my heart,
that rarest of birds.