Creektime

by NATALIE DEAM

Creektime starts with flip-flops stuck in mud. I shuck them off to steady my tread against the give of sand and hug of flow round ankles. You can’t approach a creek head-on, it always pulls the ground from under you.
            All lurch down crumbling banks the creek was green. Now standing in the crack of it, it disappears into its glacial bed of rubbled pebble. The blindfold of the creekbed. Over the colored plain of scattered stone, beneath the screening trees and scrubbing clouds you cannot see the creek itself only : creek rock, creek leaf, creek seedpod tumbling in suspension. A wheeling turkey vulture. A rotting plastic bag.
                        A greedy crease, the creek collects and combs through every thing it clutches. The water frankly reeks—a midwest brine of upstream beef that flips white bellies. Not the freshest place around, all fish already pickled here. But the only wild in walking distance. Through rising heat the creek and I we sweat, we weather.
                                    This time last year the creek was just a thirsty lick, an itchy trickle. Rain-pumped, drunk, the flow now straddles trees drought-tipped and drowned smooth. In a crotch scum billows forth from froth. A deep green steeps in frog-churned hollows.
                                                     Each crook offers up rocks and other things to pocket. Eyes scan upstream for arc of bone or puckered fossil, glint of flint or moon of mussel. Bent low, ass basking, blood puddles in my skull and sockets. Before my shadow, minnows scatter. My trudging feet and trawling fingers dislodge pebbles, unleash clouds.
                                                            My hands lift palms of creek that hover clear then drain through crooks of knuckle. The wet leaves brown streaks that say Behold my filth! and Your fingers were already rivered! I find the magnet of my wristband was also fishing, sucking iron particles into its grip. Micro metal fish I would not have noticed but for their grit against my wrist. I grin and take a step upstream to savor.
                                                                        Then a fifty-year-old beer can splits my foot sole to flesh banks. Wow, look how blood twists out and becomes water! Think—years it took this top to rust itself into a scythe, to cover up in sand like flounder. It took one step to unearth its bite. One sec for silt and sour water to rush up-wound.
                                                                                    For a moment we the creek ring around this dripping rosie. We blush, we flush, contaminants, each body rippling through the other. I am the root-veined banks, the ruddy muck, the tides of litter. The creek is me, this bursting dam, these streaming thoughts, my bloody runoff.                                                                                                                                                                                                                  But ow.
Alas, I am not happily a body of water. My skin too thin for its fractal grind, its pebbling push, eons of gritty slit and slither. Creektime ends with wobbly hops back to flip-flops. Although we part, all upslope my foot keeps flowing to the creek, drip drop, drip drop.