Flood (revised)

That spring, the green water
behind the Pink House demented
into a white-capped river

while the western sky spat fevers,
fanatic and raving, viscera howling
along the creek’s carved battlements,

swelling over its sides past giant pecan
trees, swallowing the pasture whole
beyond. One of Van Maddox’s cows

was gathered in the tempest, tossed
around like a fat tree limb, and impaled
on a splintered stump seven miles away.

A fawn clinging to a pile of debris
luged past the Pink House and dreamily
beheld terra firma blur from meaning,

awed by the strange new world
of gush and torrent, bloody tongue
at the ready, longing to caress

dark feathers that circled rocks
downstream, at journey’s end.