We hit each other with severed branches, under green ponderosa,
before the drought, thirty years ago. Gopher snakes wove
their grey and brown houndstooth skins around the wild mint
that grew near waterways that would evaporate
as we got older, finally, and stopped playing with sticks. Now,
the creeks have begun to refill with the cold transference
of melted snowpack billowing with tadpole, frog,
mosquito larvae, and crawfish—all filling the gaps between
every silk strand of new algae. They begin their dance
as I write this not into sand with stick or twig, but with memory
and with my fingers on these plastic keys. I wonder,
after all this rain, will the sun remove its shirt, lay its body
out on grasses matted from the nautili of sleeping deer?
These same grasses—that will be gathered by the flat teeth
and fat lips of each bovine bought at auction from fair
and from neighboring barns—return with the slow surging
of the stream’s engorgement. The trees lean in and Oroville’s
dam leaks from strained spillways, as our daughter finds
the thin body of an orange and black salamander under a felled
branch. I take it in my glove and let it loose near the creek
where we watch it hide at the edges of gopher holes not filled
in thirty years under all these thin branches through which light
breaks into slivers across wet shadows; where every bird
and amphibian and minnow and severed branch disappears.
