Old Souls

We watched from the house as the river grew, helpless and terrible in its unfamiliar body.    Wrestling everything into it, the water wrapped around trees until their life-hold was broken. They went down, one by one, and the river dragged off their covering. Nests of the herons, roots washed to bones,    snags of soaked bark on the shoreline:    a whole forest pulled through the teeth    of the spillway. Trees surfacing singly, where the river poured off into arteries for fields below the reservation. When at last it was over, the long removal,    they had all become the same dry wood.    We walked among them, the branches    whitening in the raw sun. Above us drifted herons, alone, hoarse-voiced, broken, settling their beaks among the hollows. Grandpa said, These are the ghosts of the tree people    moving among us, unable to take their rest.  Sometimes now, we dream our way back to the heron dance.    Their long wings are bending the air    into circles through which they fall.    Th