Flood

That spring, the green water behind the Pink House
crazed into a white-capped river. The western sky
spat fevers, fanatic and raving, viscera howling

through the creek’s carved battlements and swelling
over its sides past the giant pecan trees to the pasture
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,
beneath a grinning afternoon sun. A fawn clinging

to a clutch of debris luged past the Pink House
and dreamily witnessed the vagueness of terra firma
blur from meaning, ready to accept the strange new world

of gush and torrent, bloody tongue longing to caress
dark feathers that waited on the rocks, at journey’s end.