Last Chance Creek

On the other side of the creek
a woman is asking for help
cauterizing a wound
that just yesterday
was beginning to heal.
Believing in last chances,
she walks with a limp now
being careful around old mines
she explored as a child
in a ghost town looking down
through cottonwood leaves
like a damsel fly
above the green sky
as if too much ingenuity
might keep her leg from healing
but to disclose anything more
might alter the course
of Last Chance Creek.

 

Spreading Ashes in the Old Summers’ Burying Ground

I never thought I would be
in this place in October, the pictures
are all wrong and yet something
feels familiar, the change of a season,
autumn in Ohio I haven’t seen
in twenty years, I had forgotten
how fragrant the trees are,
old oaks and younger maples
when their leaves have turned,
how the insects and frogs
sound almost cautious
heading into these colder nights.
After these deaths, I am given
this season because it takes me
so beautifully into winter I won’t see
we slow down from the cold or grief.