Stone Dams

There was a creek by Grand Blanc Middle School in Grand Blanc, Michigan, and after school it belonged to us. It wasn’t much of one, a few feet across in most places, cold in the shade, and full of whatever the neighborhood had thrown into it. We would slide down the bank and build dams out of stones, trying to hold the water still for as long as it would let us. It never let us for long.

Stone Dams is a poem about remembering that creek. It is also about childhood, the natural world, and all the ways we try to control things that were never ours to control. Kids stack stones. Grown men bring tractors. The water goes where it wants, and the heron outlasts all of us.

Stone Dams

We stacked stones in the shallows,
the current leaned its weight,
a tin can shifted under mud,
the water gnashed its teeth

A frog sat still in shadow,
its throat a lamp gone out,
the glassy surface trembled,
the frog’s eye never blinked

Branches pinned the channel,
the dam began to leak,
minnows flared like silver,
then vanished into silt

The creek spoke in a tongue,
a language I almost knew,
its vowels were broken bottles,
its consonants were bones

Tractors idled in the channel,
their blades beneath the clay,
the willows torn to splinters,
a culvert swallowing light

A heron lands without sound,
its eye a single command,
wings tear the sky wide open,
its shadow does not move

Stone Dams © 2026 Eric S. Chapman. Illustration by Rein.

If this one stayed with you, you might like I Got Lost, my five-poem chapbook, or my essay on Pere Cheney Cemetery, another Michigan place that is mostly memory now. New poems and essays go out first on The Republic of Dust.