The taste of sun, sweet, even / on a cool day, filtered / through those particular trees, though now of course / the trees are gone; still, / the spiked sweetgum balls that fell and gathered / against the bank; still, / the way the light split, and the shade / fell, and grayed, and all the leaves / turned to dust and gathered

the same way the snakes used to gather / and still, and take heat / into their bellies; the texture / of scale, and all of them so small, / and beneath the scales, the long / row of bones, the texture of those too / against the scales, against my surface; / both of us absorbing - I think sometimes / when the snakes moved like light / and felt something quick become slow / in their jaws, they must have blessed / the texture of me,

and the way the neighborhood children watched - / from a distance, of course, well-taught / to fear anything legless and scaled, / or at least anything reminiscent of the fall - / their eyes widened, their heads / shaved against lice or the future / their hands so incautious among the leaves / they could almost have been

the water, always, the water, flowing / to nowhere, really, no lake, / the pointless stream / conscious of nothing but its own movement, / wearing my edges civil / bit by interminable bit, / uncalculated and always so near / and always moving except

that one night, / and day, and night, when everything / froze, and the light became a forking / tongue, shattering through the ice / like time, or conversation, and no one / listened to the branches and the trunks split / except me, and I did not split / before the thaw, or after

the spring, when the sun came back / angry, and all the children were gone / or had gained an appreciation for cool rooms / and glowing screens who saw them beyond my sight, or / their homes had become cocoons from which apartments / would soon emerge - I speculate / from the way the dust / changed, became a mass of tree / and not of leaf, tasting / burned, but not like a fire would burn,

and yes, I have known fires - this once, / not even around the creek's corner, / there was a loud noise, and a tree / became a home for all manner of char / and then a home for rain / and rot, and small crawling things / that had been strangers to it, / not like the ants that had crawled across its bark / before the storm, though they remained, /

as did this one child, young, scrawny, / who used to sneak out of the house / while their parents were away, or asleep, / and stare, and stare, always /  alone, mouth slightly open, eyes barely blinking; / the way they would rest their hands' edges / on my surface; I think perhaps / they found the the cool of me / comforting, or the stillness, the way / nothing about me ever changed -

Michael Hodges lives in Seattle with two roommates, one of whom is a dog. Their work has appeared in Drunken Boat, Magma, The Santa Ana River Review, and elsewhere; their debut full-length book, An Idea of Feathers, was released by Blue Sketch Press in early 2022.