The Concrete Crick

I am a city boy and care little
for the natural world
but I can not ignore what

Granny on the Beverley Hillbillies

would have called it "The concrete crick."

A 30-year-old Koi pond expanded by

An artificial creek.

A concrete trough with embedded stones

Unnatural nature

The sound of rushing water

and the whir of electric pumps

fill the air

life thrives somehow

Pilgrims arrive

dust from the air
became silt that covers
the concrete bed
like milk chocolate

tadpoles swim nervously

fluttering over crayfish that

slowly move the silt

like grumpy old men puttering

in their underwater gardens

How did the crawdads get here? I ask myself

I don't know.

The frogs, I assumed, hopped.

The Koi were purchased from a pet store.
The turtle must have walked from
the bed of the Kern River
three quarteers of a mile away.

I am a city boy and care little
for the natural world
but since I saw the crawdads
I started watching the concrete crick
like it was streaming video.

I surf the web for info on crayfish and tadpoles.
As I watched the crayfish devour carrion,
I've started wondering about reincarnation
I've eaten lobster.
Lobsters and crawdads are arthropods
These are deep thoughts
I hate deep thinking.

The great wheel of life keeps turning.
In life one you eat an arthropod
in the next life an arthropod eats you
Some day a crawdad might feed on me
Karmically it might happen
but probably not

A butterfly lands on a
dessicated stalk of a day lillyI start to wonder
how did an insect become a kite?
Off on a tangent again.

Capitano Tedeschi

30

The Concrete Crick copyright 8/25/2011 by Jamie Jacks