for Jody Bronson, woodsman
Rushing in a tea-tinted freshet,
McMullen Brook winds around rocks,
slides over logs, strains
through tangles of low hanging branches
until slowed in a deep,
swirling dark eddy where the water is whipped
to a small beehive of foamy
meringue in ivory and taupe swirls.
Dizzily it twirls, a rotisserie of tiny
rotting leaf particles and dying
algae whisked to a froth. It’s a pirouetting dancer,
spinning cotton candy, and my childhood top
all collapsed into a hypnotic
clockwork of accelerating time where the invisible
briefly becomes visible in a whirlpool
churning with precious decay.
Photo by Jody Bronson
