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. Silent 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. 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)