Rancocas

In the summer,
it's a fire-walk on scalded soles
across the street's coarse gravel,
sandpaper pinpricks of burning cinder.
Even the carpenter bees
are quieted by the velvet heat.
Too lazy to burrow or bore,
they can only hover and thrum,
dip to skim the soft shell
of an old dog's ear, too sun-baked
even to bark at the boys
as they make their way to the lake.

In the fall,
they make a game of throwing rocks
at the geese that gather like the pebbles
jostled against each other
in the jam sticky palm of a child.
Each stone lands on the bank with a thud,
or upsets the water, plunking heavily,
or makes its mark and scatters the geese
in a frenzied flurry of feathers,
their frantic chatter echoing,
like ripples on the lake.

In the winter,
when the lake is sugar cane and frosted glass,
the children trudge, packed and bundled,
through the wood to the trickling creek
with a river's legend of a boy who broke through.
Now, the almost-memory of the splintering crack,
his fall into the slush and sludge below,
leaves each child holding his breath, quiet as the deer
that pad whisper-soft, and ghost between trees,
leaving no trace, but furrows gouged in twisted bark.

That spring,
the first glinting rays of sun
let the creek stretch and crack
its stiffened backbone,
straighten its mud laden banks
and return the boy's drifting body
--turgid, bloated, swollen--
his slick-wet jacket snagged
on brittle bony branches, reaching
like gnarled hands to the creek.