-This poem reflects on a dry creek bed in high summer, where absence, memory, and the shape of return remain even after the water is gone.
Where spring once carried silver through,
the stones now lie in open heat,
their pale backs bright beneath the sun,
the channel emptied into light.
The banks still keep the curve of flow,
roots reach where water used to pass,
and under weeds and broken shade,
the earth remembers what is gone.
No current cools the waiting hand,
no small clear voice runs over rock,
just this bare shape the season leaves,
when heat has asked too much of rain.
And still the bed is not erased,
it holds the thought of what may come,
the dry made hollow for return,
a silence keeping place for water.