| GRAY MATTERS ISSUE |
A SHORT COLLECTION OF POEMS by Mark Vinz The following are excerpts from Mark Vinz’s collection of poems The Trouble with Daydreams.
THE MEMORY OF WATER
44
RED RIVER BLUES
Here where the Sheyenne joins the Red— upstream, the Bois de Sioux, and down, the Buffalo—imagination finds its way in swirls of white stirred by the prairie winds.
Tonight the news of drought sweeps in on western winds— topsoil laced with smoke and snow. Nothing can stop that message here.
These are the places towns were built, water flowing underneath snow-covered ice laced with tracks of skis and snowmobiles and creatures rarely glimpsed by passersby.
The empty rain gauge chants the last faint summer dreams; around the house the earth has sunk another inch this week.
Today I’m home from a desert visit, where a week of rain had finally broken— arroyos carried everything away except for pools on asphalt roads.
Even flat land falls away: this is the place where all directions cease. Just past town is the only hill— the overpass for the Interstate.
How inevitably it all flows off and disappears— water and what it has been named for— here, in this glacial lakebed where I live, still dreaming of the great herds passing.
