from Fritch Mill (2021)
An ode to a woman and her Douglas Firs during a record-breaking heat inversion in the Pacific Northwest. An ode also to the Letter H.
‘aitch was a ladder to the sky,
‘aitch was silent, holy, as was God."
-- Anonymous
1. Unsilent H
Tracing a jet stream incoming
through the air space I passed through yesterday
above the Cascades, I see in its dissolving trail
the East Coast steaming in July,
its cities, cemeteries, and deciduous trees
in their vast and leafy sameness sweltering
under the sign of the three ‘aitches:
Hazy, Hot, Humid,
what back East we call the muggies,
from which I fly each year around this time
into Cascadia’s big sky, big trees, big everything,
long sight lines in all directions
over once-wooded valleys and farmlands,
clear-cut moonscapes and construction,
into a circumference of waters and mountains:
Mt. Baker to the north, magisterial Rainier,
Seattle’s sky marshall, to the south,
St. Helen’s toothy stub down range
on a horizon of volcanic cores,
and on our approach above Lake Washington
glints of Puget Sound and further west
the remote Olympics, jagged, austere,
scraping the sky to the Pacific.
Then to come again to earth
through all this Northwest otherness,
to find you sleepless at the airport gate,
and there to spirit us away in your old KIA
from skylines, freeways, replies to all
and all things too connected.
Then to drive straight out
into the foothills, the fly over,
the down there from up there,
the Google nowhere on a map,
past old homes along a logging road
that seem unplugged-in, if that makes sense
and if you’ve got a nose for it.
The way in is through a creaky metal gate,
tires over gravel, a look around the place
to a concrete patio with flower pots,
one long crack in it and two old chairs
for sitting under towering Doug Firs
and looking up at trails and wisps of things,
and for one bright summer evening
and with each other’s help
the world let slip.
2. Of Hearing
And finding myself each morning,
old tree hugger, jogging pigeon-toed
up the narrow two-lane Fritch Mill Road,
its logging rigs lugging by
three feet from my left shoulder,
in one ear and out the other,
until all I hear in the passing heave
and gear-grind of the rigs,
are echoes of the clear cutting
that, one way or another, bring us here,
timber, rigs and jogger, to the crest
of this old neighborhood around the mill
and to a moment’s splendid view
east to the Cascades, cleared years ago
under lingering jet trails.
3. Haven
She sits in her patio rocker
laughing and speaking in flowers
that bloom, it seems, at random
in assorted pots and planter boxes,
and of the weeds that she pulls daily
from her gravel driveway and along her fences.
And of the dozen sky-high firs
left here and there around the place,
her sentinels of wind and rain,
of rolling thunder and first light
and deliverers of trim and broken branches.
After years away from him
she still mentions her companion,
that cockeyed shelter cat she found
damaged, anxious, fierce and fat,
the one she named Chalice
for his luxurious gray fur and flat snout
that fit his noble look, she thought,
like a medieval jousting helmet.
Twice a day she’d hoist him up
in front of her to rub his head,
to be rewarded with a knightly hiss,
her daily hiss of love, she said,
and there they were, a pair
in disagreement and agreement,
hissing at each other, face to face.
If their hisses were love’s carapace,
his were buried in the garden by her feet
under a plaster statue of a cat asleep,
where she now sits reincarnating him,
as she’s already done in print
in three wry, whimsical novellas,
as a wise-ass river cat, a castaway,
a boatyard stray tossed overboard
in the Guemes Channel by Anacortes,
who resurfaced with a name and tongue in cheek,
Tobias Andrew Oberon, The River TAO,
reborn, adventuresome and curious,
nosing into unsolved mysteries
and talking back in people-speak.
Then there are the wall-to-wall displays
indoors of photographs she took
of creaturely eyes close up:
of raptors and reptiles and her favorite
migratory waterfowl, staring from her walls;
eyes of eagles soaring on the Skagit thermals;
eye of iguana shaken from a tree in Florida;
a wetland heron poised above a ripple;
a baby alligator blinking in the sun;
tufted crowns of wall-eyed pelicans;
an older boyfriend, blue-eyed, wrinkled;
a sea of eyes in a flamboyance of flamingos.
Eyes! Close up! Shot lens to lens
into their irradiance, looking out on her
or not, but looking out.
(Continued in the book)