Carrie Causey

Creek
February 16, 2012 Causey Carrie

Creek

 

Now it is easy to find where the creek dwindles, where it thickens at last, where its mouth closes into a ditch near the highway. The world was also small when you were young—trees bowed inwardly giving you leaves for you had light in your vessel jumping and lapping like the creek carried home in a mason jar, a small audience of ghosts following you in the wind, like wind, continued ahead as birds. Now it is impossible to be a creek (rub clay inside the canals of your ears swallow a small stone). Don’t you remember? Its face is an eye—it’s only you who sees your memories run across it.

Carrie Causey’s work has appeared in Ploughshares; she is the current runner-up for the Wabash Prize in Poetry and working on her first full-length collection. Her first chapbook, Ear to the Wall, is forthcoming from Ampersand Books.