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Shifting Light, photo by Calvin Hennig
Shifting Light 2004,
Columbia River Gorge 1982
I woke to the same dream. The room hadn’t changed:
the Buddha was still small and stiff, one brass hand raised
over the bed sheets; the old mirror returning the far wall
with its usual disregard for exactitude. There was no gold
in the morning light. A lighter dark seeped through the blinds.
A single car rushed the empty street, a river over sand, and I dreamt
you were coming out of water, again. Rivulets of hair, dark grain.
I was picking blackberries, careful with my naked body
among so many stinging thorns. A mother led her calf to the river
but it stood crying on the sand and wouldn’t go in
until you swam upriver, small as a stranger.
The berries weren’t ripe, hard, heavy-seeded, hardly
a temptation. We were twenty. I was planning a pie, sweetening
what was sour. I remember that summer. A girl died in the same river,
tangled in the roots of the trees clear cut from Native lands.
Her body pulled down in the snow melt and backwash
of the nuclear power plant upriver in Washington. Mt. Hood,
newly topless, smoked. It’s a sin to let time sugar the past.
Behind the fridge the mat of hair and dry milk I never cleaned.
Let the mill at the bottom of the sea, endlessly churning salt,
preserve us as we were,
so we can arrive at this morning, a finger of dawn gold
traveling from the eastern window, across the pillow and into our eyes.
photo by Calvin Hennig
Unkind, Inclement Month
Four days of nor’easters, five of rain. The trees open
the ten thousand
green tongues, damp bark cleaving
branches—whole sentences of gnarled twig, still green
with leaf, lichen, first seed—thrown to the ground.
Open your heart to me, sap-thick, rung.
Cleaving is both ax stroke and embrace
green in all directions, lightning rising
from the ground with the look of falling. Call
the ten thousand. They will witness.
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