The Creek

Let the cello tell of the creek—midnight-black,
even at noon, the arch of long grass, the velvet
of cattails around water’s edge—water-home
to eels and crabs, glossy as a dark, dark sauce.

Let the cello bow an adagio, soulful in the heat
of Virginia’s slow summer, let it tell of the low-
tide and the reek carried on air thrumming humid
notes as insects spin and reel and oars pulse

their plumes and drive the rowboat my father
captained. He’d harvest his crab-pots, packed
with Blue Crabs, natives of the Chesapeake—
crabs stealthy, sinister, but not smart enough

and, caught, were all click and claw, as shell
scuffled with shell in the bushel basket where
Dad dumped them to fume and glare. A child
then, I’d stare at those mean claws, scared.

But I had other reasons for being there: I alone
believed in a treasure hidden in the old leaf-piles
at the land’s sloping end, under all those gold-
brown, soft mounds—dead, but brimming

with mystery and with the promise understood
so much later. Let the cello tell of the promise, ripe
and dark—like the creek, like something waiting,
waiting to conceive, burgeon, carry me to a land

on the world’s other side. In those rowboat days
I faced, unaware, toward the Place of Real Buried
Treasure—Home’s better name. There, nature’s
nurture would mother life’s grit, lodged deep

in the heart, into priceless pearl. Let the cello
sing of my creek. My creek: a child
of the Chesapeake, and the Chesapeake:
a child of the sea.


Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, “Nocturne No. 4 in C-Sharp Minor for Cello and Piano” from Six Pieces, Op. 19





 - Johanna Canton

Johanna Caton, O.S.B, is a Benedictine nun of Minster Abbey, in Kent, England.  Her poems have appeared in The Christian Century, St Austin Review, Ekphrastic Review, Amethyst Review, One Art, The Windhover, and The Catholic Poetry Room , and other publications, both online and in print.