Heat Wave: Poems and Aphorisms

FRAGILE

Cloud
Burst
Outpours
Rain upon
Parched
lips

Lips
of lupine
Welcome
Fuzzy
bees

Pollen
coats
Bee feet
In golden
dust

Sunlight
Diamonds
One Droplet
Balanced
on the
tipping
leaf

RATTLESNAKE CREEK

From high mountain springs
Jeweled trickles of life
Invigorated by snowmelt
Pelt down from Stuart Peak

Rattle…rattle…snake
Creek of dippers

Merging side streams
Purified wild waters
Scented in resiny needles
Ephemeral mayflies rising

Rattle…rattle..snake
Creek of bull trout

Winds sift red-osier dogwood
Leafing and leaning over banks
Knitted in thirsting roots of
Cottonwood, ponderosa and fir

Rattle…rattle…snake
Creek of kingfishers

A courting pair
Swoops and loops
Sky with water with earth
A love song of naming

Rattlesnake Creek
Rattle…rattle…snake

HOT IN THE GRANDE RONDE VALLEY

Before heat becomes an umbra
shawling scorched air
A rooster doodle-doos the
coolness of dawn

Where sunlight rappels down
from Mt. Emily
First rays are soft as
spider silk

GIVING THANKS

Before I rise
Into this day

Bless the morning song
Finch, robin, and siskin

Give offerings to light
Brightening the mock orange

Know that the trees talk
Softly in their root tips

And my sweet husband
Brings coffee to me in bed

HOW TO SPELL INDEPENDENCE DAY
(On the 4th of July after reading “Good Night” by Carl Sandburg)

First flights of songbirds from the nest
Spell with wing glide and flutter
Teeter and tip, land on my shoulder
Not yet knowing danger
That is freedom’s companion

Fireworks soon to spark the night over Pilot Butte
Will they spell shooting star rockets
Fountaining sprays of shattered rainbows?

Record-breaking heat waves are no accident
Gaping bird beaks, rivers drying
While golf courses glow emerald green
And fish go belly up.

The way to spell Independence Day
Is to add the missing syllable

Interdependence
Our lives are the gasping fish
One destiny

OREGON ANCIENT FOREST HIKING GUIDE
(A scattering and arranging of words, with apologies to the author Chandra LeGue)

Your snag patch
Ah how erotic
Shadowed places
Wookpeckers know

Turn now to a living tree
Nose nuzzling bark
Finding furrows
Clefts and fissures

Let me roll in your understory
Lacy racy fern bed unfurling

Gaze high into wispy
Draped lichen branches

Climb the canopy
Where I will cavort with
Wood warblers
Kissing the sky

METOLIUS

Fireweed blooms
Pretty in pink
Ready to dance

Fish idle and school
in icy blue pools
As cedar waxwings
flare their fancy tails

Douglas fir drapes
above river colors of
Lapis, quartz and jade

Bald eagle lances downriver
Wings of majesty
White head and tail
A beacon of free flow

Vine maple leaves
Scarf the ponderosa
perfumed in vanilla rum

Lorquin’s Admiral butterfly
Orange tips on black velvet cloak
Necklaced in white teeth
Patterns of perfection

Osprey nest tiptops
the candled larch
Unruly mop of sky sticks

Rubber boa pliable
pasta noodling
across our trail
Softening worries

Setting sun casts
nets of rippling patina
Reflecting amber pines

Our tent
A tiny thumbtack
beneath the Mother Tree
Pine in reciprocity with
Cedar and Fir

Let us sleep here
Small, slumbered
Dreaming

Metolius sparkles
Radiant as
a giddy girl
In love

SPICE DRAWER MISCHIEF

Cinnamon pounces upon cardamom
Dried mint spies chocolate sprinkles
Ginger shakes it up with curry

Waltzing spices puff up clouds
Raining oregano, basil and thyme
To the one-two-three beat

Set by cayenne pepper
Hot to trot for golden cumin
Even as she slow dances with
Nutmeg who really is in love with
Saffron
sealed
in
her
glass
jar

SELECTED APHORISMS FROM DAILY JOURNALS

REVISING MY MANUSCRIPT

Like tending a wild pollinator garden, revising takes a discerning eye to pluck out the sneaky invading weeds that weaken the native narrative.

Seek the balance between the twill of unruly words and the linear path.

Like wandering through a wildflower meadow barefoot, I discern patterns and meanings where earth is soft, rocky, or rooted.

Themes elude like silvery fish escaping a kingfisher’s beak, while meanings begin to emerge in a glimmer, a flash, a dream of knowing.

Find the story to know the answer.

When the dance of swallows over the river becomes the dance of my thoughts across the page, my pen will trace the choreography.

There are many ways to hum—like the wings of hummingbirds, the buzz of bees, and of story yielding a melody.

ON HEALING

Turn to the sun photosynthesizing leaves, where my skin pores become stomatas as I learn the way of energy and transpiration.

To inhabit a day without full health is to gain empathy with all who suffer and to become a more generous caring person.

Refugia of Metolius runs icy cold in the warming climate like a bracing tonic, restorative, renewing, and strong.

ON MOTHER TREES (with thanks for the inspirations after reading and loving Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest)

To live like a wild forest is to tap into a way of giving and receiving and kinship with the Mother Tree that is Gaia.

Turn our big brains away from hubris and toward humility. We might start by kissing the ground.

The communion of the forest is a conviviality of cooperation as intertwined as lovers, as vast as the galaxy.

Like kindling and rekindling friendships, never let the embers of our love for trees turn cold.

ON WALKING

Softened moccasins protect feet that feel the living breath of earth with every step.

Rise at dawn on a summer day to know the thrum of our garden bursting with birds, bees and butterflies one foot at a time.

Twirl in the sudden rainstorm breaking the triple digit day and feel the drenching among this party of friends together at last—vaccinated and hugging.

In the forest at twilight of a heated summer day, my steps meet the prancing coyote who retreats to yip, bark and yelp from a high rock—this is their time.

Do we belong to the twilight when coyotes are free to roam or are we an intrusion?

Walking at dusk, find the sear of nighthawk, flutter of bats, and trot of coyote.