For Dennis Held
He'll miss a lot of things,
many of them small and fleeting—
things that his words have given a permanence.
His poems about Vinegar Flats
take me back to when I lived there in the 80s
in a farm house overlooking Hangman Creek
(they don't call it that anymore).
I remember a big rock in the middle
where a great blue heron always fished,
the water so strong and mesmerizing that some days,
the creek was fixed,
and the heron, the rock, and I were moving upstream.
And Harlow Hotrum, our unofficial neighborhood mascot;
Steve Adams's glass studio;
Wayne Ueda's dad's auto shop;
The Japanese farms;
and Vinnie's Victorian house on the corner
where I learned to milk goats;
where the band rehearsed,
the chick singer teleporting lyrics
across space and time, taking us
to the banks of the Wabash, far away;
pleading for hard times to come again no more—
lyrics sung above a creek where just last week,
after a decades-long absence,
I saw that the heron's fishing rock had eroded,
was now smaller than before.
The water and the music and the poetry
flow out of Vinegar Flats,
and nothing gets in their way.
Chris Cook is the current Spokane poet laureate and a trumpet player for the Spokane Symphony (among other things).
