Along Deer Creek

She remembers the dream, or part of it while walking her daily walk three miles of quiet time, she only alone past Peterson’s dump yards of metal heaps rusting cars and trucks and she is past it in thirty-six steps breathing hard climbing up to where the Hunt place stands hidden beneath a fraternity of crooked oaks her sneakers crunching rocks pushing dirt into the wind as she moves past Calvin’s tiny house a yellow Ford, 1962 stranded in time and garage. She walks beyond straggly strands of Manzanita leaves, tiny round tiddlywinks; she sees the possum and the pigeon possum and pigeon both flat, flattened, flatter than an envelope, a green leaf. The pigeon on her right feathers splayed colorlessly gray and white and gray and white, the head sideways one eye up, a bottom-feeder. A flounder on the tarmac. The possum on her left, arms stilled in the midst of reaching forward stopped in mid-lunge, chin crushed into the gravel, fur a dance floor for maggots. She stops at the cliff’s edge, sees the creek below, wild blue-gray water rumbling like freeway traffic orbiting a city. She revels in the noise and its meaning,

earth atoms hydrogen oxygen sticks and stones pushed yonder, unidirectional unstoppable, the force, gravity, the weight of yesterday’s ice and snow and rain, now in charge of its own effects. A fragment of the dream a chunk from a worn boulder falls and before it tumbles more she pockets it and walks on.