Survivors

Hungry even when food's no good,
the godawful son they saved from scarlet
fever claws the bank for red clay
smooth enough to eat while Riley and Edna
search the streambed for what they call
arry heads, chipped from white-veined chert.

Weeks later I will scribe with the heel
of my hand a crescent in the even
coat of river silt blanking the windshield
of their '78 Pontiac. Black moon
in a powderwhite sky, outhouse cutout,
it will illuminate, will show me:

Blankets twisted out of sleeping bag over-
lying camp stove and lantern; tent
pegs still attached to parachute cord
stitching pots to ripstop to headrest
to sponge rubber poking erectile through vinyl
seatcovers-all coated with gray

silt the color of that conceptual art piece
I saw six weeks ago at the traveling
exhibit underwritten by and featuring
the work of a famous actor whose piece was
actually good. All that night as I lay beneath
the open window and a breeze tepid

as my own tongue laved my face, I kept
waking to the storm that would not build.
Not the moon, not plates of the earth,
the huge domes of air sliding across each
other like mating whales-this wall of water
pushing through clay banks is what

I dreamed. Enough to clear the light
pressure knocking at my temples, to wash
chips of chert and granite down into the next
blue pool cut in limestone. Folks awakened
like me by what they never asked for
stand around and talk it over. Or pile

the gear they've gathered up around the house
and borrowed from Edna's sister whose roses
the boy ruined and blamed it on the dog-
pile it into the car they owe on and that costs
them thirty cents a mile they can't afford to drive
just in time to save it all from being swept off,

but can't start that Bonneville anyway, the roar
so loud Riley can't hear her shouting at him to go
so he does just to get her out of there, and they
run up the access road in plenty of time to watch
it rise across the wheel wells
and for him to say "I didn't flood it. Must of

got the distributor wet." And the boy, already
looking in runoff ditchwater blood-thick
with red silt for drowned frogs, has somehow
held onto the flashlight, making neither of them
think about saving the charge, but both remember
the arrow heads which even now the current
rakes against the windshield.