Spring Creek Elegy

Spring Creek Elegy Your body hung like a potato sack. Branches snapped like wrists in the one nook of the world I could have called unpolluted: make-out spot, redbone chaperone. swallower of bikinis and beer, Your steps, just before, slippery on periwinkle snails. Your toes never trusted the rash of them on flat rocks, their risk tiny balanced against creekwalking, nor have mine: I crush them, despite shells stronger than government design. I check my shoulders for tan lines beneath the tree where you took your life. I know the man who stood in your shadow at midday. Places open up. The waterhole we've always called Waterloo where I learned to dogpaddle, where I found a locket where I parked at night to think in tune with the falls rushing over blackness behind them. The creek dumps itself unabashedly into the river, but you are not allowed to suffer wide where a community lives. You were no lost cow, wandered to mistaken pasture to swell and bleach where water and earth collude. We could let no decay free you here. Please understand. You can't take it back. —Melanie Jordan 110 Ill ...