Omega Bend
by Derick Burleson

Here's where the world comes to an end.
Floods all spring and the snagged roots
of what was once a yellow pine growing
too close to the river. Only now
the river has gone back to its banks,
now the river has gone back to its banks
and sun wants you to believe it's July.
If the river snatched the silver star
I've worn for years now, snatched the star
when my body fell back into clear water
thawed from Bitterroot snow, whose sin was that?
I hope a boulder wears it now, that star,
or that it washes up on the beach of fine
sand glittering alive with flecks of mica.
The children still wet from the river
rolled themselves in hot sand that afternoon
as in powdered sugar or powdered gold
and flung it into the sun all afternoon
in bright streamers of joy: the river sand,
the sun wanted to eat us all with joy
that day where rattlesnakes slither through star-
thistle, where red-tailed hawks snatch those
diamondbacks and teach them to fly, where ospreys
snatch rainbow trout and teach them to fly,
where every morning wind blows upstream
and evening blows down, where that afternoon
truly loved the gold of wheat fields, the gold
pastures of cheat grass and sweet grass growing
through the pumice of an ancient volcano where
the sharpest possible sliver of the new moon
sliced over the deck of this house built safe
far above the Clearwater River on a cliff
and the wind in my face felt like sea wind
as on the deck of a ship on which
someday we will sail down this river
all the way to the Pacific to watch
the stars at the end of the world go out.