Brushy Creek Incident
Brushy Creek Incident
by DIY Danna
The greenstone moss guardians of the park
are damning the torpedoes inside,
the sun god breaks through the clouds to warn me
of the crashing waves over round rocks.
He appears and sites on the log where Sam Bass sat
and schemed and daydreamed, I suppose:
the chill of late winter freezes time past,
but not the currents of thoughts,
endless sounds of meditative white noise
hushing my cries of helplessness
to kill the enemies inside.
Because the battle rages in stages of grief.
The tears of the creek never dry out either,
for joy or sorrow from the sky
doesn’t stop the crying in my dry season
when friends can’t express empathy
without the fear of losing hold
of broken hands that cannot mend quickly,
they cannot understand the limbo
of limbs that want to linger, grow longer…
Yet over time, friends and our limbs bend, weather
and snap like twigs in a storm.
The fragments of still living trees
fall apart in rushing water, become sediment–for new lives.
I like parts of it–the turn of “damning the torpedoes inside” connecting to “kill the enemies inside,” the play of “they cannot understand the limbo of limbs that want to linger, grow longer”–but can’t quite grasp what the “brushy creek incident” is: the battle of relationships (?), surrender of empathy to fear(?), and how the creek acts as its metaphor. The ending–“the fragments of still living trees…become sediment-for new lives”–seems a pat uplift, which doesn’t resolve the obvious inner torment expressed.
Randall, you just made me smile an cringe at the same time, in a good way. ‘Brushy Creek Incident’ is intended to be part one of three personally revealing, self-impressionist poems, but I added the last line because I wasn’t sure about revealing more “inner torment”. Perhaps I should damn the torpedoes, consider this a work in progress, and include the original version in a chapbook. Maybe you should be my editor.
Addendum/Correction: you made me *smile and cringe. Thanks for appreciating parts of it.