concurrent

Our toes wormed deep beneath the rivermud,

winged things buzzing low,

branches hanging from the banks

to etch cursives upon the water.

Copperheads slurred over the surface,

brown as the sediments

chanting below—

but we didn’t call them that,

we called them Oh fuck, and ducked,

as they sailed overhead.

That summer the rains gorged the hill country

and we bumbled to the greenbelt,

all tubes and towels and

thoughtlessness, to the trickling

afterthought of the creekbed,

as it was most years.

Neck-deep, you slipped out of your trunks

and told me to look under—

but the silt was up,

the murk billowed, cosmoses of sand,

and I never discovered where the season ran out.

Somewhere nearby, it might have been that day,

a high schooler from the district over

tied his swimsuit and never came back,

from down where summer ran dark,

and the thwack of the rescue choppers

drowned out the rapids.

Texas, dry too long,

went manic in the storms.

Then with the county so full it could burp,

then with every sort of floatation sprouting,

then they said Be careful,

they said Unseasonable,

meaning Unthinkable,

and across town heads tutted back and forth

with the shame of it,

lacy hats bobbing

like boys in a current.

We argued while hiking our tubes back upstream,

 (only able to avoid

  ourselves while afloat),

fighting downstream logics,

deflating things that we

couldn’t shoulder forever.

I’d made plans without telling you.

I’d left texts unanswered,

olive branches empty.

You couldn’t stand a mudslide.

You needed hills to

remain as such.

Twigs nipped us in

ruddy silence.

Still, it ran.

Several seasons of flowers have

since come and gone from his grave.

Here, eastward, where my road ran out,

the waters choke gutterways,

old asphalts mottle the breathing dirt,

all is spoken of in terms of

 oversaturation,

 overcapacity,

 the ever-overrun.

You were married at an autumn ceremony.

Here, rain does not come and go

in grand agonies,

it settles.

Gone are summer’s madnesses

gone, what we told each other over and over:

“Hold your breath.”