Antidote from In Place by Michael Dickerson

A creek cures quiet,
slurs out the unsounding day of pursed lips,
leads by example, barrels without straining,
stresses what sickens into it, slats the platted bluff,
wrests birches into itself,
rockfall clatter subliminal beneath,
birds calling out their spring needs.
Creek makes a good fence,
better than stone piles, centuries,
a field, bones of fish,
woodpiles, lichen one day
wrapping a cairn into place,
Silence at a creek is daylong,
days long, swollen and uncrossable.
A creek can make a good fence,
neighbor to nothing, grumbling
in darkness through which its erosion
and clatter is just audible,
trees toppling over the steep bluff, into water.
A creek thickened into one channel
tries to braid itself,
is a torrent that seeks to shallow and calm itself
beside me here, living unfenced, the leaves
patching away the sky and weather,
the nature of this tin roof

(amplifying rainfall
as leaves, grown just since middle May,
amplify winds and muddle the water's murmur.)

• Alaska
• Alaskan
• Alaskana
• Alternative
• composition
• place-based
• Anchorage