Craig Finlay
On Drummond
Squatting on a flat rock
You brushed your teeth
with lake water so clear
it looked more a rumor
than anything else
You gathered driftwood, bones
along the black pebble shore
weathered the same
we ate pears in a bowl
of jack pines lakeside
And how am I this way?
that I see such a thing
and think, performance
if I woke tomorrow
as a deer, I fear I’d dismiss
my own antlers, steaming flanks
frost-strewn prairie grass
as a gaudy display of nostalgia.
Craig Finlay is a poet and librarian currently living in rural Oklahoma. His poems have appeared or will be appearing in numerous publications, most recently The Ilanot Review, Little Patuxent Review, Levee Magazine and After Happy Hour Review. His first collection, The Very Small Mammoths of Wrangel Island, is being published in March, 2020, by Urban Farmhouse Press.