Burnt Bridge Creek

I know you flow through legend and lore
And through the mist rude children would explore
When indoor play has played itself out
For a too vain search for lingering trout.

I've not lately strode upon your banks
To reminisce above my spindleshanks
About how green your drainage used to be,
And how it was a commuter's folly
When flames consumed your bridge for the trolley.

Oh, I think of those days...flatteringly...
When sovereign was the budding twig and leaf
And only country lanes beheld my grief
As budding thoughts of youth would go astray
In that flabbergasting juvenile way
Which will brook no surveillant vision
To spy on adolescent indecision.

Where now is such elusive solace found?
Where to quickly flee a commercial sound
Without adding to that mechanized din
The ringing of nature in a tailspin?

And yesteryear as real estate
Is just no way to make a nation great.

There was still a hint of the Pleistocene
In the muddy walls of your ravine
Spanned by the timber fall of '62
When Columbus Day had a storm blow through,

And sure enough...we burned those bridges too.