Three Poems

Crooked Creek

‘…bodies being but the shadows of beings, they must be so much the more
charming as they shadow forth spiritual beauties.’
              Jonathan Edwards, ‘The Beauty of the World’

The stream, milked with limestone, drifts
across a patternless mosaic
of chert and kelp-slick stones.
I watch a thumb-sized catfish
as he whiskers through the gravel
in search of damselflies or pill bugs,
his barbels like translucent fingers
blindly tapping every pebble,
every nook. Along the deep-cut bank,
he’s stalked. A trout, torpedo-dumb
...