“Crinkly Brook”

by DEBORAH W. A. FOULKES:

A crinkly craggedy-banked stream winding restfully through a little valley atop a valley. Logs, hoppeldy ploppeldy all over it. Twisting and tangling and lopped off and tumbled, half propped-up trees. Disintegrating wherever they feel like it. Sod you, it seemed they were saying, to the foresters and tidy-uppers of woods, the plank producers, the fence producers, the administrators of the forestiness. Sod you, they said, all piled in a heap over the brook, their branches spastically awhirr to one side and hanging off and rotting and broken and full of moss and full of insects; and the woodpeckers and the forest birds picking at them and gorging themselves on them. Sod you, they said. Sod you.