This Oxbow Lake

This oxbow lake
of midlife is cut
off from
the full meander of
my days across this
earth-place.

Nutrients remain.
Gathered
from the countless
sloughing-offs of
their origins
far and away
in the collected-ness of
who I have been.

A childhood
memory of learning
to write my name
on the back of a
double blue card
from Candyland
having seeped into
the rock over which the
streaming of my pieces
have flowed.  An amble
along the cornfield
in the mid-winter
morning of my high school
days of trapping
is drawn up into the
tree trunk that sits
just at the water's edge.

But the whole of the water
is left to less than
it has been
by the rushing flood
of constant change
calling me away
from the well worn
bed of my days.

There is a circuitousness
to the love between geology
and our souls.  A way
we come full round to seeing
what and where we have been
and how we have become.

What moves beyond
and what remains
has been a question
that is given up
over and over throughout
the lives of humankind.

A flood pushes through
a sidewinding branch,
carving new routines
into the foundation of
our bedrock.  A handful
of things are left here,
but most are gone.

Who is the who
that is left behind?
A leaf floats across
the surface of the
river and is lodged
along the red clay
silt packed together
as a berm on the edges
of this water-course.
Tomorrow it shall
become dirt, too.

Who is the who
that determines meaning
as we shift and change
and idle in our banks
of the water of our days?

This oxbow lake
of midlife is cut
off from
the full meander of
my days across this
earth-place.

Nutrients remain.
Gathered
from the countless
sloughing-offs of
their origins
far and away
in the collected-ness of
who I have been.