Loading Dock

image borrowed from bing

Loading Dock


Over at Cabarton’s bridge,
Riding two feet high,
The launch looks down
At Payette's slack flow.
No caravan rafts in tow
Lining up to get afloat.
Water’s low. Riding the rapids--
River-rock-n-rolling’s over.

Grasses gone honeyed, fair
As wheat on McGregor’s land.
Dark as soldiers on a dull day
Stand the stubby fence-line pines.
Cows hunch down at the lick:
They look up, stop their licking;
Heads then drop, resume licking.

My heron flees to its white snag;
Kingfisher waits at his pond,
Fizzing water off the hot pool,
Stinking gases and orange scum.
Through it cows have trampled
Then down the sedgey mud slough.

Down at the north lick, the cows—
By their weathered loading dock--
They huddle, look up in stunned gaze.
The cows, they just don’t know.
They just, they just don’t know.

David Gilmour