What the Bonaparte River remembered:
West, west, and south, through grassy hills, sage-stung, cactus lying low, water over gravel, rock-weirs and riffles where steelhead spawn, going back, dawn redwoods, gingkos, going back, back, Cenozoic, Mesozoic, glacial features preserved, quartzrose rocks fine-grained and foliated, greenstone and argilite, water-birch and cottonwood, gathering silts, fallen boughs, a dead deer, taking in Machete Creek, Clinton Creek, Loon Creek, the Parke children wading in the shallows, alert for snakes, arrival of springs and the dark jacks, west, west, all my waters surging and surging, alive in sunlight, lit by starlight, look, a horse swimming an oxbow, swirling through hayfields, machines mowing and raking the fine interior grasses, shadowed by hills, flooding the flats near Cache Creek, winding around Elephant Hill, flowing all the way down to my wild entry into the Thompson River.
...Theresa Kishkan 