Creek Running North

The writing goes slowly. I need to look away.

I head down to the creek.

A storm front comes in off the Pacific, skirts our valley to the south. Rain scent hangs thick over San Pablo Bay. I can taste it. The leaden words with which I struggle drown me.

I watch the creek for a while: it rolls over gravel bars. Its motion is chaotic and predictable, erratic and constant. I work out transitions, eyes wide open, not seeing. This unethical attorney orchestrated a land grab by Big Coal, that mesa was stripmined and dessicated, coal flowed 300 miles to burn on the river. It takes some time to clear my mind. It takes some time to plunge my thoughts into that gravel bar, to dilute them in moving water, a slurry of old anger and fresh joy.

I come to myself. My eyes fall to the tall grass on the bank. The grass is vertiginous, weaving oddly upstream and waving back. The motion of the creek is an object. Its afterimage on my retinas makes the stolid grass stems dance.