around my seventh year
of forked lightning,
i remember a storm,
an opening of cumulus
floodgates
                    extending
longer than my forearm.
the drowning levels rose,
bloomed,
                 and our pond out back spilled over,
     like so much noble grey from china pots,
        by the long barn, below naranjo peak,
                  with its namesake
a luminary of psychedelic
psychiatry and the gestalt,
                                               i played myself
to exhaustion in a marsh of gods and survival
the meadow pulsed;
no grass in zephyr-dance,
or ambient movement,
but for the desperate
flopping of fish,
silver on silver,
ruthless flood
displacement,
refugees in hostile land.
each moment i stayed staring
i lost another fish, i knew,
and the rain was thinning
and i was six, and a gallon
bucket was just the right size,
and for that afternoon, i grew
scales, and gills, fins,
                                     i couldn't
let them die, or keep suffering,
i scooped them up, bucket filled
up to my small arms' capacity,
and returned them to the pond,
making sure the transition
was comfortable for them.
i only remember now that
the others began eating
their dead once they could
swim and dart past one
another.
               i sloshed and splashed
all day to save my kindred fish
from a dry slaughter, en masse,
only to find them flowing out
once more when the rain picked up
from its reprieve