At Dry Falls

My body barely knows heat when I'm baking,
breathing the dust of yesterday inside.
I check which birds says "phew, phew":
just a gray desert nothing unaware

once families gathered along the river,
wound up the cliff side, ducked down
into the breath of cool beneath rock.
The char of past fires sheltering a new blaze.

And the surge of river onward, onward
deep and green gray, swirling with salmon--
a day's hike from where Grandfather
mountain shrugged his shoulders and blew

continental plate atilt and water lost from view.
Sometimes life is like that, a cloud full of delay
and sway, a ride where there is no control
and the peace of drift is all one can grab.

And hold on tight, a lifeline from the land
where plentitude shifted in an instant into sand.
Slowly with time, our faces crack from ice
and wrinkle and fall into remembering

once we were without ice, without loss,
without heat and ready to mold.