Derek Sheffield

As Seen Through a River

The bank of silt cools
          my bare skin where I kneel
and pore over a skittish mob
          of water striders whose spidery,

wire-thin limbs do not
          pierce and sink, but press
into being supple dimples,
          and as they stir they talk

in clear syllables, a jittery council
          I can only watch. Around us,
sagebrush flares from a land of hot dust
          like campfires, a hundred years

of green flames. Power lines rise and dip,
          buzz out of sight. I must say something
terrible as I reach in, for my bugs
          twitch away in rippled

exclamation, my arm left dangling.
          And my face from the underside—
a wobbly thing
          exploding ring after ring across the sky.

~Derek Sheffield
from A Revised Account of the West (Flyway, 2008)

About Derek Sheffield

Derek Sheffield’s collection, A Revised Account of the West, won the inaugural Hazel Lipa Environmental Chapbook Award (2008). His poems have also appeared in Poetry, Orion, The Southern Review, Ecotone, AQR, The Georgia Review, and Wilderness. He teaches poetry and nature writing at Wenatchee Valley College, and lives with his family in the foothills of the Cascades near Leavenworth, Washington.