Shoal Creek
length, 11.2 miles;
drainage area, 12.9 sq. miles;
watershed, completely developed

(I)

In the teeming once-dump by the collared river
cottonwoods heave their presence from dirt.

Erosion everywhere—the past, its peoples—renewal’s blight
displaced this place. Houses stilt the creek, in Little Mexico,

reach over rocks made familiar by water’s daily temperaments,
each day’s spilling over

into dusk. The fruit packers, sex workers, bricklayers,
students in their converted warehouse, the meat cutters, the water’s edge,

tamale sellers, the candy makers with glass cases to keep off dust,
the creek bank, the edge of wash, sewers and retaining walls,

rubble and domestic trash, calcareous clay, alluvium’s corona,
the fossil fish teeth which teem Del Rio Clay, before

and between Tonkawa and Comanche people robbed, robbed still,
and still here—all rise as development’s din sinks to quiet.

The heat, an escarpment rising
and rising
to where the red-shouldered hawk
drips thermals.

Hungry on a hackberry bough
she sways with her caught dove plucked
from where it hunkered in runoff, fixes her gaze
to the displaced vista
where Our Lady’s absence marks
communities scattered.

Trust the creek to overflow again with not a drop
of forgiveness diluting its red waters. Paired herons pump
through a wedge of wire-sliced sky; invisible
a jay asserts a false-hawk from heat, voice, instinct.

All that human progress uncoils at flood’s touch.
Here, nature is often indivisible from refuse.
The city’s porous, impermeable flesh twitches
like paralyzed fur over blood refusing to be dead.

Low places perplex the patient, persistent towers,
their opaque and leering glass. In water’s
ceding gloss, a litany of flowers
questions our landscape—

horseherb, frogfruit, elbowbrush
ligustrum and honeysuckle
pilot plants and native species
mustang grape, sumpweed, fleabane
poison ivy and agarita, ferns in civic shadow.

Leopard moths lap at a street lamp,
worn glitches in this city’s plans.
The creek once excavated like a burial
resurrects under sudden flowing air.

(II)

Little Shoal Creek, tributary. Interred in 1917, and covered by a storm sewer.

Meander at its root – water down there, discontent down there.
In the time of dams, rain for days, though never enough to fill dirt’s coffers.
Flood debris, shadow histories, bottomlands: look to the low places!
the living jumbled creekwrack! even lower, where limestone coves the earth,
to infrastructure’s many disrupted species – pipes, ducts, access tunneled and forgotten,
an ecology of cracks, disconnected cables sleeping in bulk in unused halls –
a honeycomb
balanced
on a hive of stone.

Under the blooming trestle, in shade, he reads alone,
tucked in his concrete hive, he who knows his own name, we who do not.
Through day, the red-eared slider picks over shadows toward a moveless pool
of recent rain, past light-battered flies jewel human shit, the nightly needles
disarticulated like insects’ legs. A packed and sodden duffel steeps its bundled life
in stagnant water and debris. Chalk portraits on retaining walls, lost faces found
speaking out to those still waiting downstream. We fixed a logic to the creek, you said,
my guide in effluent and asphalt, we “rationalized” it. Concealed within hazard
Shoal’s diurnal sleepers, the unhoused founding refuge in water beneath
overgrown skyscrapers. Days packed in aggregate
in the photos you held in sequence: the creek thinned, miles narrowed,
whole months in blasted sepia in a cordial garland of poisoned weeds, whole gaps
where men clambered, their names buried in the rock and mud beneath
the child in stiff shoes gazing from atop the new-laid concrete pipe.
Smeared with heat, cypresses still archive its living meander
coiling with contexts flowing through vacant lots covert with seeds,
rowdy with hardscape, through switchgrass shuddering
with planks cast on stone the welder’s hiss
expansion’s cicada bellow fading false into the thrum of local locusts.
Humans are harbors— hold, extract, exploit.
Can false milkweed trust the dirt from which it glosses rubbled life?
Today the light is hard, tomorrow harder still.
Epiphytes synapse the live oaks, pull water from dense air.