I’m running out of gravel
in the fifty-pound bag I bought last summer, 

the one that sags a little more each month, deflating
in the corner of the shed. Eventually it will empty 

and I’ll be stuck finding something new to fill 
the trench I cut to channel runoff around the foundation 

of our house. The last owners never had this problem.
Sure, there were plenty of other things: the jury-rigged plumbing 

under the bathroom sink, that pink foam insulation 
stuffed up the chimney to stop a draft. 

But those were one-off repairs. If only every crisis 
was that simple, patchable with ingenuity or luck. 

The trench slumps a little more after the last storm
and I head out to fill it, waiting for news 

that the next county over wasn’t so lucky this time. 
Overnight a foot of rain can fill the deepest of channels,

raise the river twenty feet and launch boulders 
the size of houses down the mountain, send neighbors scurrying

onto their roofs. We all chose to live here. 
But the more we rebuild the less we remember about why, 

how the ridges kept the world distant, didn’t speed
its sudden rush in. We could let the kids play

at the gravel bar on summer evenings before the water 
swept it away. We never worried if they weren’t back before dark.

You know those thoughts that gnaw somewhere deep 
but never quite surface, the ones you can’t bring yourself to face?

Someday the yard, the house, maybe the whole town 
will drift below. For now, we’ll settle for lesser moments, 

handfuls of pebbles shoveled into the breach.