Forest Float (Dix River, May 2020)

Don’t think I’ve sent any poetry out on Shatty Town. Here’s one from the getting-close-to-done transfer of my older stuff. This one was started on a paddle in 2020. Revised for posting on the NoC site on January 6, 2022. And now revised again for its present December 2024 posting here on Shatty.

***

In the main, it takes
a heavy precipitation
consistently applied.

Upriver, for saturated soil,
springs with no vacancy,
& an emboldened Hanging Fork
to force feed a beheaded upper Dix.
The pressure rising,

for our undertaker
at the dam
at Herrington
(per SOP)
to open the floodgates and
inundate our lower body
with the lowest, the coldest
of catch and release
dam-water. At the mouth,

a distinctly Kentucky backwash
of sycamore logs and soccer balls
enveloped in a light brown froth,
for the current to arise
and whip itself
into a great eddy that rubs up
against the ancient downward thrust
of everyday fluid dynamics.

Where these waters mingle,
a hundred year flood
sprung of three relentless days
of rain falling
and rivers rising,
I have seen
the forest float.