At Nickel Creek

image borrowed from bing

AT NICKEL CREEK
(for Joseph Rice)

A while ago we walked
up to where you’d stayed,
old friend

we saw where you’d slept
blue-blanketed narrow bed
and the glassed wide doorway
you’d gazed through onto the mountain

the first night it rained
thunder rolled and rumbled
as you told us later,
your face a smile but serious

we had gathered my poems
hundreds on white sheets, poems
reaching back
half a century

but what you remembered most
was the fierce wind
out of the pass
and the stars over the mountain’s slopes
that, too, is a poem, you said.


Robert Burlingame

Posted over on Bobby Byrd's site White Panties and Dead Friends