You would run through the neighbors' yard

Overbrook and Billantau Street

Cut the corner to the break in the trees

Heading where the light sinks into the dark

To take the hidden path that leads to the creek

And the embankment where they'd sunbathe asleep

You can see it where the light bleeds back and ahead

Where approaching with your knees bent down

Keeping close to the slope

Crouched low under the cover of reeds

You'd sneak and reach your hand in behind

Try to grab on the tail, hold it up in the air high

Feeling it writhe, feeling it panic, trying to twist

From your hand clenched tight in a fist

As if trying to swim

Swiping its claws toward the ground

But finding nothing underneath it could reach

To break free into the water below

Where you knew you shouldn't ever get close

How told since birth

They'd leaked poison throughout it all

The only history you really knew about

Not how gypsum spilling outward gave a name to the creek

Or how mining it dug tunnels beneath every street in the neighborhood

The ones you took to get to the woods

You knew their names not where they came from or meant

All those dead men, fading languages left

Last vestiges above intersect

To the river where the creek went

Where two centuries back

They came prophesied to settle the land

Took the rapids out with the dams put down

To float timber to the factories on the banks of the grand to build homes

Before they made furniture

And others came to live and worship, started a church

To raise families and their families started ones of their own

And you follow in reverse where it goes

Backwards home

To where you're staring at the water below

What would happen if you fell down the slope?

If you drowned would your body wash out?

Would it carry all the way to lake Michigan?

And if you didn't, would the poison inside

From the river kill you later in life?

In the kitchen with your wife and your kids

Eating dinner when your body gives in?

And again

Sitting with your family in church, would it matter anyway if it did?

If it's true what the sermon said

In heaven there's a ledger and you're there circled twice

On a line in the back does it matter then?

If he'd never draw a line through your name

When you found that magazine in the woods

Why the shame flooding in

When they asked if it felt good to look and it did?

And you blink and you're back but you're no longer a kid

Here at church to say goodbye to a friend

Who like you was circled twice on the line

And he took his own life

If you give in to the poison inside

Could they deny you when you try to get in?

And at the water again

You swing your hands above the creek

Reach to find the ground

There's only air underneath

And you understand a lack of control

When you look upward from the water below

To know whatever held you upward let you go

And you fell

And there's only one direction the water flows

There's only one direction the water flows

It only goes forward

Forward

Forward

There's only one direction we go

And we can only go forward every day

To the end where we began

To the darkness up ahead

And everything that happens in life

Will never happen again

And you spend your whole life learning to swim

And you can never know what's over the bend

And every moment passing is another one you'll never get back

And you can only get older

Older

Older

Man turns the lathe on the blade, sharp

The grade angled down

Carves away at the grain where the hand holds the blade

Spins around then falls soundless to the ground

And what it takes gets swept up at the end of every day

Gets thrown into the stove to burn away

Turns to flames first to burst, bright to smoke, climbs to fade

Makes the steels glow with warmth

Gave to hands, touch the face

And what remains becomes an arm, becomes a leg

And when assembled at the end becomes a chair

For you to sit

Became the railing on the staircase at the first place where we kissed

Became the roof

Became the bedframe in our room

Became the house where we first lived, and we became

What we became

What we need here just to breathe

Everything in me spinning on the lathe

Against the blade, turn me into shape

Carve it all away

Throw it in the flames, turn it into heat

Let it keep us warm at least and me

Let me be the legs, let me hold you up, let me never break

Watch the past fall away

All our lives against the blade

Because the time goes and we change

Not what we made but what can be

Come with me

To cut the yard

To where the dark leads

To the creek

To the reeds

Will you please?

Do it just the once

Do it just for me

Let me sleep

In the sun

Let me feel you reach

Hold me out, keep me up above now

Let the time freeze

Come and lie here with me

At the creek

Before we go

Before we must

Fall in it with me

To the rush

Into the lake

Let it wash us all away

Become the waves

Become the air

Because we breathe

Because our lives go

Only forward

And we die

(Looking back, are there any things that you wish that you could have gotten accomplished

That maybe just didn't get done?)

I knew I had done my best, I can live with it

Because I've lived in it all of my life

I was born in it, so I've learned how to live with it