Sill

(Field, B.C. / July 2009)

It was near dark and I went along a gravel road up into the woods
where a stream crashed off a great peak. I stood without knowing:
what it was, that element in motion. The cold air it sent up, with a cut

of oxygen. White sounds atop the clinking of stone on stone. Matte
depths, and dull or transparent shallows. Velocities, back-eddies,
rushings. And not a pause in it anywhere, not a hint of frost ahead.

I lay on a wooden floor in a bare upstairs room, …