The Creek
Not rooted, as if cut and put for people, an old tree stump waits in the creek, a pedestal for an office worker’s lunch break. In miracles you may or not believe but notice your face hovering over the water and now perceive the halo gliding under a strider, how each foot-well puckers like a liquid lens. Likewise, crowning shadow in refraction, belief begins not in baptism but surface tension between the light of the world and the face of the water and the self-image we anoint. Ripples may trace a trinity of rings to a single point. It may surprise you, an empirical observer, to find yourself thinking such a thought and even more to catch yourself wondering at the way it spills around a bend with a noise like churchgoers leaving communion, a single voice dispersing into dialects of living stone, burping crannies, chuckling slabs, gossiping gravel, how it all goes prattling over a precipice to bedevil the rapids and pool again in peace. Rumors of gross gutters, legends of bright lawns whisper down the watershed, converge where a spring runs pure as myth. Let those with ears judge: Is this a deceitful brook? Do these waters fail? Come in quiet when the questions start and listen well to the ruddy creek that rushes through the heart.
--R.S. Mitchell
R.S. Mitchell is a writer and editor based in Crozet, Virginia, where he lives with his wife and two daughters. He blogs at foolfathomfive.blogspot.com.
