Finch Creek

A poem on demand

I was asked to write a poem as part of a Crosshatch project to invite writers to Antrim County to give a reading and lead a workshop. Antrim County has a deep resonance for me. When I was young, we would travel by car from Arkansas to Michigan, and when we crossed over into the Antrim County, I’d feel the temperature drop, and begin to smell the trees and the lake. Magical. So we moved here, as soon as we could.

From Finch Creek

If you look down from the footbridge, 
there’s the log and the ridge
of swirling behind it, pine needles 
blocked up, perfectly wheedling
each other into position like 
iron filings, in semicircles, little spikes
in the brilliant water. Beyond,
where three streams are working to bond,
it’s a roiling of waters. Below, the stream 	
exactly mirrors the mossy trees.  
It’s so pleasing to see how it works
without my help! The earth perks	
along, a huge magnet, holding us all. 
You can’t control much, appalled
as you might be about the condition
of things. You can make it your mission
to fix the world, and that’s good, 
but it helps to lean over the wood
railing sometimes and observe
the water do what it does, its swerve
of patterns. Things are taken care
of that way, in the long run. This affair
of living, short and passionate as it seems,
meanders its way down the stream
to link up with others at the bend,
no longer itself, exactly, but not the end

.