even the carpenters need a trellis on which to lay their tools.
we watched dessicated august days cut their teeth on the stream
bed, their dusky last gasps pinned in bubbles set to collapse
when they surfaced along the waterway’s dusted tongue. each
exhaled note built to a saraband. but there was nobody left
to dance: for sale signs bleached on barbed wire fences, bare
silt gleaming brassy as horn keys. nowhere for us to construct
new dams, no current to hold or release. so we left too. Made
ourselves anew across the fields – found a headwater still awash
in the future. we cut and hewed and hauled. oily tankers slicked
over our scent mounds, their glands vaster and more porous,
their bells clamouring even after they’d transited. and we heard
tell that the river alliance was hungry for bog, peat-famished,
itching for the cool salve of fresh flood on parched land.
they worked for days. more in each pack than we could imagine.
broke the for-sale fences into parts and stuccoed the posts with mud,
which they placed gently on the edges of the ghostly stream like
a prayer. a prayer to us, left on altered altar, grasping hands full
of fraying shores. we waited for each newly-laid bough to etiolate,
for the mud to clot paltry rain. we were not gods: just good
at building. brought spectres with us when we returned to our old haunts.