American Life in Poetry

Here’s a poem by an Indiana poet, Shari Wagner, that has a delightful time describing the many sounds of running water.

Creek-Song

It begins in a cow lane

with bees and white clover,

courses along corn, rushes

accelerando against rocks.

It rises to a teetering pitch

as I cross a shaky tree-bridge,

syncopates a riff

over the dissonance

of trash – derelict icebox

with a missing door,

mohair loveseat sinking

into thistle. It winds through green

adder’s mouth, faint as the bells

of Holsteins heading home.

Blue shadows lengthen,

but the undertow

of a harmony pulls me on

through raspy Joe-pye-weed

and staccato-barbed fence.

It hums in a culvert

beneath cars, then empties

into a river that flows oboe-deep

past Indian dance ground, waterwheel

and town, past the bleached

stones in the churchyard,

the darkening hill.