Poems by Tim Raphael

Stealing the Days

by Tim Raphael

From Canary Summer 2018

Tim lives with his family in the Lower Willamette watershed on the flanks of Mt. Tabor, a sleeping, urban volcano.

Let’s agree that for this poem a stream is a stream.
Don’t mistake its drifting leaves for reveries.

Don’t ask it to leap from the ridge
and perform for you – cartwheel
and cut, down and through.

Spare it your ache for a primeval past,
before tree fellers and mills,
before it carried our stains
through the culverts below.

Rocks in its shallows are not memories.
Rocks are rocks. And please don’t
compare it to a silky canvas
where sun sparks paint shimmering landscapes
for the trout beneath.

It’s enough to be a stream on Pioneer Mountain
and kiss cold the current
up here by the spring. Among the alder
a rough-skinned newt stands still
and a barefoot man with cuffs rolled high
steals the last days of August.

© Tim Raphael