and after the creek,
that had run a thirty foot wall of water,
finally lowered, the woman who lived in that cabin above
the flood and its debris,
looked out into the clear morning.
Sprawled face down on the rock surface lay a young girl
swept for how many miles
no one knew for some time, of course.
The woman who owned the house
shut her creek-side windows.
She feared what she thought she would see
if she went to the broken gray-white object.
To consciousness the sight was reborn an It, an object.
Had to be by now. And her phone was out.
She walked west from the creek and from the creek’s wreckage
lying on the rock surface,
and she found a phone at a nearby bar.
She phoned,
and in the time it takes too few men to go too many miles
after too many such discoveries, they arrived.
They picked up the subject
and wrapped it in a tarp, lacking body bags.
Then they put it gently into the back of a pick-up,
and they drove away.
Weeks after, the woman sold her place
cheap and moved.
Some people stayed.
Their places stand around a bend. They like
to point out the ATV-sized boulder that had smashed
into their bank from way far up-creak.
Nobody speaks much of the rest.
Long ago now for a long time.
