Member Poem

What do you get if white pine

and redwood hang on the same wall?

They both smell of rutting deer

and spring thaw, splashing aroma

against cathedral ceilings

blended into hypnotic nostalgia by

ceiling fans decorated with rattan and painted ducks,

their blades slicing smells like

mill knives de-heart pine

and the silent, ancient

redwoods, thick as twenty horses,

tall as a galloping herd.

 

Some of the old mountain men

with dull gray beards and liquid memories

like early floods say you can't mix white and red,

instead you must

give each its place, like seasons.

I've met two of these old men, and I'll

tell you this, they fear to watch

the cutting of the trees. To them,

the ax and wood are like thunder and darkness –

when they join in a capriccio echoes and dense

silence, no man can hide from the injured spirits which

inflate the leaves and stretch new branches from nothing.

The old ones don't make fire on such nights

because the equilibrium of plant and

planet, in rare instances, balance breathing with

moments of insight some people laugh at.

 

Once I wanted to remodel an abandoned prospector's cabin

with a dirt floor and a history. General Ulysses S. Grant

shot a rifle bullet into a thick round log

which forms part of the east wall. He

was a fool, the old ones say.  He had no ear

for the quiet which licks the air at

temperature changes.

 

You didn't know that, did you?

At 47 degrees fahrenheit

the manzanita bush fills the

air with fragrance enough to tempt small

red foxes into their secret mating dance.

This happens only at elevations above

thirty-one hundred feet and below forty-seven hundred feet

and only during the months of April and May.

When the old ones saw this, they celebrated

because below the fertilized legs of the foxes

gold spilled from the red earth.

 

Once I dated a geologist who threw scrambled

eggs into my face at breakfast the morning

I told her this secret.

She didn't believe.

She is one of those women who will put

redwood and white pine on the same wall,

miracle and science into the same back pack

for observation.

But the old ones knew better. They did not let me change the cabin. 

Instead, I replaced the shingles with slabs of beveled cedar

I split myself, and I patched the walls

with mud from the mound of a beaver family

so that spirit mixed with my hands and

the cabin prayed for me.

 

I asked the geologist to marry me and

the old ones stopped talking to me, but

they burned small chips of aspen branches so that

the smoke might open my eyes; it's full

of fingers, you know, aspen wood, but you must

burn it on nights of darkness and thunder

in order for its science to operate.

 

The geologist went to work for a lumber company,

and I bought a tent. I hiked

against the rapids flowing from the mountain's stomach,

searching for the old ones who left a map,

drawn on white birch, using the burnt

tip of maple sticks to stain mystery into bark,

and beyond the solitude of forest

and the quiet of sunset at equinox

I seek the magic of love and thunder.