Gleaming with points of brilliance,
a trillion suns, sparkling as flashing pinnacles
or split second crest of tiny waves,
here and now gone, consumed by slightly greater waves
chopping in turn to compose even larger fluid motions
moving down the stream, barely there,
the water was once so much higher,
now a barren, river cut a washed in unbroken streams
parting the coppery soils, revealing pock-marked mud banks, glades,
holes of wet soaked bullfrogs, massive, abandoned tadpoles mysteriously-legged
sloshing about below soil surface levels they’ll never
quite make, drowned branches defeated, bent
reaching fingerlike into rivulets and bens at the edge
stripped nearly leafless by torrents of late winter
snow melt, descending from mountain top sierras
now here somehow, weeping
delicate pathways through hills and blessing
with mis the thirst of the fields, sacred,
contained in the flesh of tomatoes and corn, then
dripping on seeds from which they were born
beneath a Sacramento sun | RO