Dry Creek Theory Poem by Fred Rik Kesner

"Dry Creek Theory"


The creek left first.
By midsummer
it had folded its maps,
taken the silver fish of itself
and gone underground.

Children still followed
the chalked course
through stones and lantana,
certain that water
must remember its own face.
The magpie disagreed.
It sang from a fencepost
and nowhere else.

Years later
I found a page
inside an abandoned library book.

No title.
No signature.
Only a sentence
crossing the paper diagonally,
as though it, too,
refused to stay.
I read it once.
The words did not explain themselves.
They lifted.
Not upward.
Outward.

Like seeds choosing moisture.
I looked around
for the missing author,
that familiar ghost
critics are forever searching for.

Nothing.
Only afternoon grass
leaning east.
Only the smell
of iron after rain.
Only distance
becoming more distance.

The sentence kept moving.
It entered the trees.
It entered a dog barking
two streets away.
It entered an old memory
that had not belonged to it
until that moment.

By evening
the page was blank.
Or perhaps
I no longer knew
where the writing ended.
Perhaps that is the same thing.

A poem survives
by escaping.
Not from meaning,
but from ownership.

The creek egress.
The grass knew it too.
The untamed line
crossing the page knew this.

What leaves
is not always lost.
Sometimes departure
is the form
taken by continuation.

Tomorrow
someone else
will find water
where I found dust,
will hear a different note
inside the magpie's song,
will finish a sentence
I only happened
to begin.
So, let them.

The best poems
do not remain.
They travel
from mind to mind,
wearing our voices
for a while,
then moving on.





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