365 Jobs: Storms (Six) Following a Boy Who is Following the Water

Saturday, December 21, 1985

Following a Boy Who is Following the Water

Raindrops
trickle
over
pebbles
to a ditch
where we drop
a cork
which bobbles
among bubbles
as we follow
to a corrugated hole
that we call groovy pipe
under the road, splashing out
from wrinkles into a trench of adobe clay
where faster now water streams to a concrete
culvert under another road and pours out sinking
into weeds. 
Gone.

No!
Here it
reappears
downhill in wild
grass and we run
galumphing in galoshes
while the spinning cork drops
rapidly in a gully through tree roots
with beer cans gushing under the hulk
of a Willys (like my grandfather drove) as
here the ground levels out while our little cork
skirts a horse pasture and runs right through a chicken coop
until behind the midwife's house it plunges over the bank on a
     wa
     ter
     fall
into the torrent of La Honda Creek. 
How utterly satisfying.
What's next?