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.