ABOVE TIMBERLINE

As I stood alone on the rocky ledge at sunset, 

looking down into the canyon, a thousand feet deep,

the distant sound of water, the steep talus slope

ringing like bells as something above me moved,

and dislodged rocks that fell into the void.

I was stuck, nowhere to go, he stepped into sunlight, 

his white fur glowed with the sun as he eyed me. 

We stood there, for what seemed like an eternity 

as we debated what to do. Each not expecting the other 

in this remotest of places high above timberline 

on the glaciated slopes of Mt Olympus.

I canted back against the warm cliff, 

splayed like a lover as he slipped between my legs. 

I admired his black hooves, his dark eye regarded me, 

as his sharp horns pierced the air.

His soft fur smelled of lichen and moss 

and something wilder as he navigated past my body. 

One false move, and we would both be goners. 

But this longest day wasn’t about facing death. 

It was about emptying the chambers of the heart, 

ridding it of fear so that we may both live another day.

2/13 with Susie Terence

Red Tide

The summer of 1981, we traveled north to stay at a friend's trailer in Pulsbo, on the Hood Canal in Washington. It was the summer solstice. At low tide, I waded in, Hood Canal was a seafood cornucopia. I gathered armloads of shellfish bounty (mussels, cockles, clams, oysters) like a mighty hunter. I swam seal-like and collected the bounty. The sea provided.  They called me mermaid, and goddess, seaweed wrapped around my thighs. (I was also the only one who knew how to clean the shellfish. So much for the menfolk). And that night we feasted on seafood. Breaded clams. Oysters on the half shell. Mussel and scallop chowder. But as we were all gorging on shellfish, seasoned with garlic and butter, and drinking wine, a news warning flashed on the TV. Red tide this far north? Gulp! I imagined symptoms of red tide poisoning, though there was no evidence of red tide anywhere. It was a long wild night of the imagination, but they soon forgot about it. Someone rolled a doobie, everybody laughed, and carried on, but I was checking for symptoms all through the night wondering if I had poisoned us all.

Trolling Old Journals

I found a stack of old journals mixed in with newer journals, and since I've misplaced most of my old writing, I took a peek, to see if there was anything I could glean, or steal.

My 1981 journals, where I spent the summer in Port Townsend, the Olympic Peninsula, and Pulsbo, were particularly rich, so I've been typing up (dictating) a few poems and prose pieces.

I was able to date several old poems, having found the original draft. What I discovered is that the writing is much more solid than I expected. Funny how you think your old work is inferior. And your new work accounts for shit. Perception. Not what it's cracked up to be.

I am enamored with my Port Townsend prose piece, and my Mt. Olympus piece, where I had a very, very close encounter with a Rocky Mountain goat.

These prose pieces would've never seen the light of day, as I only typed up poems. Prose scared me. But for the most part, it's solid and muscular. What was I thinking that it was all so bad? Part of why I began this blog was to teach myself to write prose. But the urge for story ran parallel with my poems. Anyway, should you want to peak, this link is a shortcut. (New work also in 1997, 98, and 2000. Not a lot. Yet.)

►  1981 (29)

It all began when I was uploading old poems to this blogspace, and I discovered that many of my files were corrupted. In particular, the electronic version of the HOH RIVER VALLEY file is toast. And I still haven't found the hard copy. It exists, but I don't have access to it.

My other long-term goal was to fill in the posts where I have too few poems for a given year. I am/was a prolific writer, so this is a search for lost work. Retyping old work is a bit like reinventing the wheel. But on the other hand, I'm treating it like revision.

Most of the 11 years I need more work for, are the years I don't have journals for, they're tucked away deep in a box in storage. 1998 to 2000, the years I was in grad school are particularly paltry. I know I have writing, but where is it? 1982 I was in a car accident, so I probably didn't write much. Ditto 1997/98. Some of those years I was in Amsterdam, or Russia, so it may be a case of typing up work that I never had a chance to make an electronic file.

The Pacific Northwest is on fire (photo)

Moonrise over Mt. Baker, 3 nights ago., now you can't even see the mountain.

The Pacific Northwest is on fire. Yikes! The Olympic Peninsula is burning—Paradise on Mt. Rainier is burning. The Hoh River Valley rainforest—one of the wettest place on earth, is burning. I'm crying useless tears for the venerable trees of antiquity burning. Much of Western Canada is burning. The Vancouver sky is a dirty vanilla color with all the smoke. You can no longer see the mountains—not even Mt. Baker. In California, Humboldt and Trinity, as well as Lake County are being evacuated. It hurts to breathe. Is Yolo County still on fire? What about Sierra Foothills? We need a list of places burning. There's no one central site. Wondering how we're going to get home if Interstate 5 is closed. Everything is burning.  SoCal, San Marcos/San Diego. Where else? Happy Lúgnasadh, some bonfire, the West Coast is burning—the gods must be really happy.

added 8/20

AT THE 10,000' HUT

AT THE 10,000' HUT

The glacier rose up like a tongue
lolling out of the frigid mouth of the north.
I climbed over an ice wall
to trudge to the summit.
Ptarmigans, in half-summer plumage
chuckled in the undergrowth
of huckleberry and mountain heather.
The sun warmed us as our feet
crunched over rotten snow.

From the Olympics,
a sudden summer storm growled in,
threatening snow.
Dressed only in summer gear,
we were foolishly alone on the mountain.

The first sign of hypothermia
is the rhythmic rotation of frozen fingers
and your numb cheeks no longer sting.
Earlobes feel warm,
and your skin turns from red to blue.
The white patches of creamfat
like small islands adrift on your skin
are the first signs of frostbite.

Then, the overwhelming need to sleep,
euphoric warmth, and dreams—
a jumbled series of memories
out of proper sequence, take you in farther.
Soon, you reconstruct your memories
to fit the shapes of snowdrifts,
and you float into that warm tide of snow.

A thunderbolt cracked,
stirring the thick air and our senses.
Ptarmigans dove for cover
as snowflakes settled on their mottled backs.
We turned and ran down the mountain,
each gigantic stride brought us closer to home. 

At lower elevations, the snow turned to hail,
then to rain, whipping our legs,
as we descended to Paradise Lodge
nested on the slopes of Rainier
2,000 ft. below the hut, to safety.

6/82

slight revision

2/2017

Dream journal

Dream journal

I was visiting Port Townsend with my old friend Carolyn. We were sitting outside the ferry dock which had moved and was now near the late-night market, the Breadbasket.

A big battleship pulls up to port. It looks like the MV Coho out of Port Angeles. Iron clunkers with layers and layers of paint added on until the sides were visibly thicker than the original walls.

I'm waiting to find you, you're going to drive into town at some point during the day and if I sit here long enough, I know I'll find you. It's a matter of waiting. Because you have no phone, the only thing I can do is to wait. That is why we're sitting in the sun on a park bench.All roads pass through here.

Carolyn has an ex-lover living in Vancouver she wants to visit. We're just passing through. We're sitting in the morning sun and I tell her about you, my ex-lover I met when I was visiting last summer.

My ex-lover, DJ is a juggler. A street performer. He always uses his hands. Just as I'm telling her about him, I see DJ get off the boat and start walking towards town with a group of his friends. He's describing something to them with his hands. And they are all lost in conversation.

I yell out, hey, DJ! And he comes over surprised to see me. I could almost hear his mind clicking. What you doing here? Sure, I like her, was last summer. We talk, greet each other and are glad to see one another again.

Later, I'm on this hulk of a ship. The bottom has a trap door that opens out. It was an ex torpedo launch boat, now empty of cargo. Special pumps unload water after the floors are cleaned – we close the doors and pump the water out. The ship raises up out of the water because there's no ballast and the additional air in the hull makes it lighter like a balloon.

The ship is in danger of tipping over because it's top heavy, and too much out of the water. We're all standing out on the deck steadying the ship with our hands on the dock, doing okay until the glassine sea changes and becomes littered with debris.

The debris is made of the floating mussel shells and clams, and pumice rock floating on the waves. The waves rise higher in the sea churns. A carpet of stones,

Now we're off the boat, and to the right of us is an estero protected from the waves of the sea beyond the islands. The water is bath temperature and brilliant.

I have two books in my hands. One may be a Russian novel, or maybe a Bible, and the other is a text on critical thinking since Plato. They're big fat books. The kind that make your wrists hurt if you carry them with hand and thumb wrapped around the spine of the book.

I'm entering the water and both of my hands are filled with these books. For some reason clear only to my subconscious, I know I mustn't let go of these books, to lose them would be unpardonable. I am a keeper of these books.

The water sweeps me away and I am pulled toward the open sea.

I am able to keep my head out of the water but I can't use my hands to swim to safety because of the books.

The whirlpool inundates me and I still won't let go of the books. I start to swim in the books in my hands I use as paddles. They are only effective when I hold the spines and covers tightly closed as I raise my hands to make a stroke. The cramps in my wrist are unbearable. Fire shoots up the inside of my forearms as the ligaments knot into balls of oxygen-starved sinew.

I kick harder with my legs. They have the strength to get me through this turbulent water and I head toward shore. That opening maw of the ocean sucks at the gate of land wanting to devour anything in its path.

Some of the swimmers willingly forward. Others resist. I make it to the land and fall face forward on the shore. The beach is made of stones. The waterlogged books fall open with clumps of pages stuck together. It's as if the Bible were drowned. Pages stuck together and all those words locked within—and my friends are nowhere in sight.

9/29/1981
added 10/16

Port Townsend

This town, once the biggest port outside of New York in the 1890s, is where the Chinese had carved tunnels under the streets, some tunnels are still standing. Dock Street is gone now, Water Street is the main drag.

They had to call it uptown because the uppity ladies wouldn't shop here. Water Street, where the red light is now, is for the ferry traffic.

Across from the Town Tavern, is a building the old guy inherited on the condition that he improve it, but he was caught tunneling under Water Street. Some say he was headed for the bank. No one really knows for sure. The city fathers were upset when one day Water Street caved in right in front of his building.

The year before last, he had boarded up all the windows, and before that, all the metal Victorian cornices were taken off. This year, he's unboarding a few of the windows and is painting the sashes blue. Like the sky.

This town, once a whore's town, is now a literary town. All the poets are well read. It's still a whore's town. There are red lights shining on the streets at night and, after dark, the literary whores flood the streets like migrant workers in a tent city.

Tourists and Winnebagos with California license plates cautiously drive through town to the ferry dock. They come into the Town Tavern looking for something harder than the soft liquor license allows. And we stare at their improbable attire, women wearings nylons with shorts, and men in perma-press suits. All the old hippies here are working as bartenders, and caretakers. it's all a juggling act.

I keep coming back to this town like a bad penny. A friend of mine, Sharon Doubiago, moved here to escape a broken heart. Little do I know, that this year, my heart will be in the same repair shop. Hearts are not made of porcelain, but of grist and sinew and blood.

There's that poignant moment of initiation. We all recognize the place where broken hearts either mend, or evolve into some other plane.

Whore hearts, we're all whores with hearts of gold, the wrong color for blood. Gold, the correct color for lizard blood. As we sniff out the color-coded hearts of those around us, our lizard eyes narrow, we taste the air with our forked tongues, and we retreat into reptilian silence.

Tourists pour into the Town Tavern. You can tell what time of day it is by the number of disembarked people at the bar. Like the ebb and flow of waves, the oak and glass double-doors swing to and fro, as the tourist surging in from the ferry, feel the need to slake their great thirst.

The man I am having an affair with is having trouble finding the bedroom where he last left his heart. He thinks his capacity for love is greatly influenced by his capacity for pain. I'm a transient blow-in. There's the bond that ties us all together, here in this town of whores. Down at the bar, we paint it red.

August, 1981

Flora & Fauna Notes

Woolly mammoth tusks like ribs of a beached boat.

The tide becomes delayed
among the many islands and fjords. 

Gravitational pull of the sea and especially the moon, 

causes a bulging of the oceans
traveling along the world in a great wave. 

The crest of this wave is high tide
the trough is low tide.

Tidal range is greatest at Prince Rupert
and the Powell River where flood tides
from the north and south meet and drift. Tidal bore.

Acorn barnacles stand on their heads
and kick food into their mouths with feathery feet
Purple crabs are like porcelain, clams have 32 blue eyes.
Seaweed absorbs nutrients directly from the water.
Roots hold fast, piddock clams, great sculpins.

List the islands fjords and shelters inlets along this coast,

home for thousands of waterbirds. Common snipe.

The Fraser River drains one quarter of BC 

I have been to Salt Spring Island, and Mount Vesuvius.
I'm going down the road to Ganges.
All roads lead to Ganges on Salt Spring Island. 

Offshore islands have fewer species of plants and animals
different from the mainland.
The Queen Charlotte Islands,
continental slope, continental shelf,
continental drift on the edge
of the continental shelf of North America 

Backbone of mountains rises up
from the western shore the Queen Charlottes 

I am remembering the trumpeter swans and snow geese at Mount Lassen,
and carpenter ants, spotted slugs,  

the Georgia Straits, the way the ship rocked.

Sitka spruce, willow,
Douglas firs are not the final stage of a coastal rain forest,
deepening leaf litter, climax rainforest

the wet climate of mountains facing the sea 

the stableness of the vegetation
can only be attained after a thousand fire-free years 

tideland spruce can withstand constant wind
and saltspray of the exposed coastline.
Sitka spruce, a protective buffer

Lions of the Sea
Glaciers never reached Triangle Island
burrowing seabirds.

Nothing in nature is static
the land, the sea, the climate,
the plants and animals of today
are nothing but a passage
a passing expression of a relentless process of change.

Earth air and water borne by the glacier
heated by the sun. Alpine tundra
dark dwarf willows
Northern Lakota and Plateau
the boreal forest, the montane forest
the grasslands, the dry interior, the bitteroots
the dense rain forest
and the Coast Forest in rain shadow
the Olympics, the more specific name wins
Salmonberry, salal, willow, blueberry, and western hemlock

What is this dice game played by the Micmac
500 years old
counting sticks, six round bone dice
made of walrus bone

wet piñata, loose hair
embroidery this willow cradle
has been decorated with silk ribbons
what about my silk shirt hanging on display 150 years from now? 

The value of trade silver
beaver was the standard of trade

called it the fire breaks to symbolize the meeting of chieftains

the cave of petroglyphs
long ago when the world was young
animals held their winter dances in caves.
animals changing into human form
and this so embarrassed them
that they gave man their dance 
In order that he not reveal their secrets.

Nootka Indian masks capture the initiate
Tshimshan and Kitsat want to call three eagles
to explain the universe.
Cosmology is the relationships between peoples
the supernatural is preserved symbolically
masks make the natural and supernatural world visible
they explain our relationship
and take hold

human life depends upon a healthy structured natural world 

to ensure balance Indians conducted ritual seasonal changes
crisis economic activity
the shaman kept the balance
between the three worlds
the soul capture
scattering of eagle down for peace
the potlatch
the seasons
the ceremonies
art makes the supernatural world visible

This is a lot of gibberish to clean up! I must've been planning to use it in some writing. 

Puck Goat, Mt. Olympus, Lunasa (photos)

Mt.Olympus from Hurricane Ridge. From an old slide—early 1970s, or  1981?

On the northern slopes of Mount Olympus: the ancestral sweep of the mountain, shadows are suspended across entire valleys. Talus and wildflowers in blue are the only signs of life in this severe landscape.

I am taller than the subalpine spruce forest at my feet. Like Gulliver in a Liliputian landscape. I must be way above treeline. I can almost touch the sky.  Small juniper trees hug the ground, they spread out mat like, a living carpet at my feet. The trees may be diminutive, but their berries are full-size.

A melting cornice of of snow slides off the razorback ridge and makes a second ledge of snow, well on its way to becoming a glacier. Below me, a string of glacial melt pools in aquamarine and teal, decorated with chunks of snow, icebergs in the making. 

I had to take off my telephoto lens because the animals here have no fear. Marmots shuffle up to investigate my feet and they size me up. I guess they don't get too many hikers on this steep slope. Or I look like a big marmot to them.

The only way to escape these droves of flies, is to keep on walking, or stand against the wind. I keep on walking.

I've lost count of the miles. I've come farther on one day that most round trip hikes. I keep reminding myself I have to walk the same distance back again, that each step forward is the half-way mark back to the trailhead.

But a part of me never wants to return to that place I came from. So I keep on walking. I have run out of trail. Literally. I am half-way to Marathon. My race against my pain is still not won. So I push ever on. The talus rings like fine crystal in someone else's bed as I stumble over compacted shale.

I take in alpine roses, lupine, larkspur, rock cress, a veritable Turkish carpet. Wallflowers, cinquefoil, buckwheat, Indian paintbrush, sky pilot, phlox, stonecrop—it's a carpet bazaar. A concuspiance of flowers stands taller than the tallest juniper.

In this dainty landscape, butterflies soar like hawks, and birds are the size of bears. A complex mosaic of lichen and moss grows on the ground, black lettuce-like leaves with frothy petticoats of pale green, dresses the rocks.

I want to get down on my hands and knees to worship the tiny Japanese gardeners who live here. My hand orchestrates a symphony of striated scree alternated with grand sweeping swaths of flower gardens. Beauty before me as I walk.

A hummingbird hovers, checks me out, then dives off the edge of the cliff. He takes my breath away. I lay down and peer down into a pocket valley, blue pimpernel and sky pilot and sky are one thing.

Sometimes the junipers achieve enough height for a mouse to hide beneath them. They eye me curiously, and rotate seeds in their paws as they nibble at the edges of pine nuts. Dark mauve phalacea is like bruised skin, amid the pearly everlasting.

A talus crest is black with lichen and weathered varnish. Mount Olympus? I am lost traversing range after range, I am deep in the heart of these mountains, trying to escape my own depths.

A fresh rockslide area glows coppery pink against all that dark scree. A golden mantled marmot stand up to salute his allegiance to the wilderness. With his back to me, he whistles, then screams to the valley below. I am not the enemy. Friend of your friend.

Deer graze on the subalpine spruces, they devour this fragile landscape. I drowse in the warm sunlight. Pink and white pine heather bells shudder and nod in the breeze coming in from the west. Harbinger of sunset. 

I awaken with a start. Another deer appears, a buck, two-pronged with velvet, he eyes me, sniffs the air. Drops his head to pluck tender pine shoots. I was sleeping where the deer come to feed.

These steep talus slopes are held in place by the roots of flowers, no grass or moss or soil.

On Hurricane Ridge, and here, deep in the mountains, the Rocky Mountain goats eat the precious patches of soil. They're looking for salt, someone said. They paw at soil pockets, they eat the soil, they lick the stones, they lick the hiking path—searching for traces of lost salt. They are not a native species. My traitorous tears are made of salt. Perhaps displaced mountain goat will eat them.

The bleached bones of juniper, a skeleton hugs the rock outcropping. Patches of stonecrop form light cream-colored oases on the hillside. Life and death are one thing.

The intense purple of lupine, and the yellow of wallflower takes my breath away. The papery leaves of the pasqueflower tremble on the slightest breeze. I watch the antics of a furry jumping spider dressed in black and rust.

The sizzling heat rising up from the talus creates a shimmering horizonline. The edge of the ridge drops off from sight and all the flowers keep nodding their heads in the breeze, as if in agreement. There are so many flowers that I leave bruised footprints behind me. I keep walking up the path that follows the top of the ridge, hoping it will go on forever. It does not disappoint.

The path cuts along the side of a slope, so steep, it's like walking on the edge of a box. It drops a long way down, it's little more than a goat trail and it veers off to the left to the lake camp, set in shadows. To the right, are the valleys and ridges that lead up to Mount Olympus and to the Elwah River Valley.

The track is no longer a human path. I begin free-climbing towards the summit, inching closer to that elusive spine of ridge. I tell myself to be careful, don't trust the rotten rock.

Another hand grasp and toehold: I'm almost to the summit. Hair-raising. I've gone way past my limits. But still I push forward. I'm thinking this stuff is for the goats. What am I doing here, alone, so far from civilization? No one know where I am. But, having come this far, I want to look at the face of Mt. Olympus.

Silently, white. Above me a jagged shape looms. I take it in at eye level, powerful forelegs, and I look up to a white fur chest. Black horns and yellow eyes appear. Am I hallucinating?

His beard, and breath tells me he's real. Uh-oh. This Rocky Mountain goat coming down from Mt. Olympus has right-of-way. Cars going uphill may have right away, but then I'm not a car, and he has sharp black horns and the surefootedness of hooves.

The rules of right-of-way on a precipice is not to stop in a dangerous place. He has no hesitation as he advances toward me. There's literally no place to go. I back down the crevice, the small of my back tucked into the base of cliff that arcs down 2000 feet of scree. The angle of declination will not stop my descent into space. The angel of declination.

The goat hesitates, he looks at me. We make eye contact and we each make a silent pact. He has to pass right by my feet. There is nowhere else to go. I drop my gaze, and look down at my boots. I present no challenge, i make no eye contact. I empty my mind and I become wind, rock and sky. I come and go in peace, at will. We are one thing.

He does not challenge me to a duel. He carefully passes me, his fur is silken snow. He is a young ram, ousted from the herd. So I know there will not be others following him.

So I follow him down the spine, back to where I came from. I am shaking, adrenalin, fear, a rite of passage. I'm taking photographs of his back. They're not as good as the one I got as he appeared over the horizon. I took photos first then realized the potential danger I was in. The camera is an extension of arm, an automatic reflex.

The goat is eating his dinner, he is pawing up the plants to get at the minuscule pockets of soil hoarded there. He eats the earth, craving salt. I smell of salt and tears. He is not afraid of me as long as I move slowly.

We stay like this, entranced for an hour or more, in the evening light, the goat and I, before I descend back down the mountain at twilight. Northern lights dancing in the distance.

Something truly memorable has happened. A wordless quest, answered. A heart mended. I return back down the mountain a different person than that grieving woman who left behind her sorrow in the fog shrouded dawn.

August 1, 1981
October 11, 2015
(Found in a journal, most of it is verbatim, I added the context when I retyped it.)

Anacortes

August 1 & 2

I'm at the Anacortes fair selling jewelry with Leo and Terry. We're watching the Bosco boys live. I catch their juggling act for the first time. It's rough. I don't mind. 

Terry says "every time I see you, you've moved a little farther north."

DJ hugs me. it's hard to pick up a welcome hello hug after a hard goodbye hug two days previously. He hugs me again. Just in case.

As the day wears on, their act improves. So do we. During stolen moments between their acts and my breaks, we go off in different directions at nightfall looking at each other questioningly. 

Next day, their act improves, and we know once again our friendship is solid and between breaks we hug and kiss and talk about northern tier, how that joke cost them potential money during the pass the hat, because Anacortes is a working town. 

They don't laugh at those kind of jokes. It doesn't matter. They juggle the clubs.

We pass each other at the fair we stop hug and kiss. Soon it's time for goodbye. He says, "I don't know whether to say goodbye or, see you next weekend."

"This time it's for real," I say. We can't seem to untangle our tongues. I give him a poem about kisses, and our act improves.

WHILE WAITING FOR THE ANACORTES FERRY

AT PARADISE MEADOWS

AT PARADISE MEADOWS

At the foot of Mt. Rainier

Chief Seattle sat pondering the face of the god. 

Did he know of what was to come? 

On the slopes of the mountain 

I bathe my feet in hot pools 

and wander in fields full of flowers. 

Larkspur, lupine and columbine.

These meadows were made by beavers 

felling alders to engineer the snowmelt into dams, 

this place where history seeps into my pores.

Tehama, like a breath 

the name of the mountain.

Snatches my mind away.

Circled in fog floating in a blue sky.

Underneath the mantle, the steady drip of rain 

shrouds the face of Tehema.

Across the sound, Chief Seattle, 

with his two wives following behind, 

was buried in his dugout canoe, 

in full view of the mountain.

Among the steaming pools and snowmelt 

I pick flowers on the slopes of paradise

wondering why it has to be so hard. 

The upheaval, and the price of beaver pelts,

smallpox decimating entire villages.

All that's left is the name of the mountain —

Like a breath, the name floats on the air—

Tehema, Rainier.

Tehema.

7/1981

 Port Townsend, Washington

added 10/16

minor revision/line breaks

ACROSS THE BLUE OF GLACIERS

ACROSS THE BLUE OF GLACIERS

A thin line of flowers stretches
across the blue of glaciers

Mountains meet head on
like rippling bones bleached gray

Glistening whales resurface among the ice flows

Their spume spraying great hunks of sky

Across the water  blue streaks on sparkling snow

The alcoholic snores of glaciers calving,
wraps around the heart like a blanket
as we snuggle in, summer nightfall on the tundra.

I am not a fisherman's wife
throwing back the day's catch

The snow is the color of roses,
red roses, and I dream of primordial suns.

7/1981
Port Townsend, Washington
added 10/16

Pulsbo

Pulsbo

July 30, 1981: I'm back in Pulsbo again. An old song, an old saw set in the key of honkeytonk blues. Ten days after I said I was leaving, this inertia sets in… The feeling that I'm blowing it, but I'm trying to be clear, to be honest… The snags of human emotions are things really as complex as they seem? I keep pushing forward, thinking each time the dilemma will be the last, things will improve. Sometimes, the quagmire is right out the back door. Human interrelationships, the complex web of reason spread before me. We are each spinners of the web we weave.

7/30/1981

10/15/2015

FROSTBITE

FROSTBITE

The glacier rose up like a tongue
lolling out of the frigid mouth of the water

Ptarmigans, half white, half brown feathers

chuckled in the low undergrowth
of huckleberry and mountain heather.

The sun warmed us as our feet
crunched over bauchy ice and rotten snow
as we approached the summit.

A thunderbolt cracked,

stirring the thick air and our senses.
Ptarmigans dove for cover
as snowflakes covered their mottled backs.

Hypothermia begins
with a rhythmic rotation of frozen fingers.

Soon numbed cheeks cease to sting,
earlobes feel warm. And skin turns from red to blue.
White patches of creamy skin
are the first signs of frostbite.

One begins to feel the need for sleep,
such euphoric warmth, and dreams,
a jumbled series of memories
out of proper sequence, taking you further.
Soon you reconstruct your memories
to fit the shape of snowdrifts
and then you float into that warm tide
of snow, smiling.

7/29/1981
Port Townsend, WA
added 10/16

On the Dosewallips Trail, take 2

Stones sink into the snow leaving holes that drop down into the pack. The pack rearranges itself with a slow downhill crunching steps down from its own weight.

The roaring of last nights trees gives way to the multiple drone of today's flies. I am the only living thing around. The horse flies follow me for miles, flying a halo around me, each wanting to claim my flesh as his own.

A few clouds drift by, leaving folded shadows like black snow patches draped over the peaks. Talus slides encourage the flowers to grow in long lines downward, one plant below the other, the upper offering protection to the ones below, and the ones below offering protection in turn, and so on.

As I hike on the trail, my feet crunching on rocks slowly convert the finely shredded talus into dust.

The mountains are breathing the honey of flowers. The panorama of the Olympic Mountains becomes too beautiful for words. Soon the eyes ceases to see. I drop over the crest into the eastern rim where the starkness of The Brothers and Anderson Pass pacify my burning, too bright eye.

The vegetation too is different on this side. Taller shrubs and flowers. Also less variety. The trees are tortured trunks leaning upward into the hill for stability. Sometimes they crawl back up the slope 4 feet or more along the ground, trying to get back to where they first set root.

July 1981
added 10/16

Horseflies on the Dosewallips Trail

The roaring of last night trees gives way to the multudinous drone of today's flies.

Scattered stones sink into snow leaving holes that drop way down into the snowpack. The pack rearranges itself as it slips downward from its own weight.

I am the only living thing around. The horseflies follow me for miles, flying a halo around me, each wanting to claim my flesh as his own. To the left, the Inland Passage, the Cascades and Mount Baker, are all dreaming, tucked in a layer of marine mist.

Scattered clouds drape folded shadows of black ravens over the snowfields and peaks.

Talus slides encourage flowers to grow in long lines downward, one plant below the other, the upper plant offering protection to the ones below, and so on, all the way down the slope, in vivid color.

As I hike on the thin trail, my feet convert the finely shredded talus into dust.

The mountains are breathing the honey of flowers.

I run into another backpacker. I can't even trade my flies with him and he is sweaty and tired too.

The panorama of the Olympics is too beautiful for me to take in–soon I cease to see them. Blinded by such beauty, I become blind to it.

I drop over the crest into the eastern rim where the darkness of the Brothers and the Mount Anderson massif pacify my burning, too bright eye. I traverse up the Dosewallips River. So much to see: Grand Lakes, Moose Lake. I can't take it all in. 

I look back in order to look forward, and realize that these are the same mountains you can see from Seattle. They say Doquebatl, enraged, changed a woman into Mount Rainier and her son into Little Tahoma.

The small inhaled double chirp of the striped chipmunk is the only song in this still landscape.

July 1981

rev 10/15/2015

Oral History: The old fisherman said

The old fisherman said: (I didn’t get his name).

I'm originally from East Washington. Always wanted to fish. So I got myself a boat. Sold my ranch. Always wanted to see the ocean. Wanted to fish. Wanted to ocean fish.

 I wound up in a partnership. I had a gas store back in the day, those were too loose and fancy free days, I was in a partnership. See that gas store, the feller paid for half of it. Then he wanted me to buy him out. I didn't have the money, and he gave it to me.

Then one day out of the blue, I was out of business. I sold it and bought me a another boat, a cruiser 24 feet, by golly. I fished it a year. Then I got another boat. Fished two or three more years. 

Met a fellow down in Glencove, I traded my boat in for three or four lots. Then I traded those lots for a 30-foot cruiser. I converted it into a trawler and finished eight or nine years. Salmon mostly. 

Yeah, moneywise, I made a good deal. Made $2000. Good money then, by golly. I could've traded the two of those lots and had the lots and the boat yeah.

I live right on the beach now. No home, no boat. Yeah, but that fella, he had a heart attack and died in his sleep. And then his two brothers took over. They'll inherit the lots I owned, and the trailer and the boat. And damned if they didn't sell at all for hundred grand. 

To think I got it all going with that first boat that I paid $700 for, after I sold my ranch.

I felt like hell today, my wife, she went downtown, and maybe she'll bring me some dinner. Yeah, I fished eight or nine years for salmon. I'll be 80 next month. Doubt if I'll make it through the winter. My dog's 17 years old. He's deaf. Been that way for years. He doesn't pay much attention to my wife. Yes sir, he's a one-man dog. Yes.

7–29–81 Jefferson County Beach, Port Townsend, Washington

Sangre de Luna (dream)

Sangre de Luna

The cloudbank rests on the Olympics like a shelf or a tree fungus, cuts off sunlight with mist a thousand feet thick. While Victoria is in full sunlight across the Straits.The smell of the tide overpowers the odor of breakfast, it was a bargain for $0.69. I got a whole-wheat sticky bun, coffee in a Styrofoam cup, muddy coffee by Cremora.

Last night was an unusually high tide, was it the full moon? In the water, within the foot of the ferry dock, a flood tide. The sand shifts, races like the water, only in a slower syncopated rhythm. Fish leap towards the dock lights. Its red glare rippling on the water, the same lights that flooded our high ceilings.

 Under flannel sheets we snuggle. God I haven't had those since I was a kid sleeping in my grandfather's bed, in my grandmothers room painted green. When he died, I moved into that green room, and his quilt became mine. It had roses on it, I remember.

On the beach an old dog barks and howls, more like the way a child who is forgotten why he is crying, does, but likes the way air passes through his vocal chords, weaving primal sounds around the human heart. I understand his loneliness, like the way the waves understand the slant of the shore.

It's a soft Irish day. No it's a grand one. A fucking grand one. It doesn't matter which. Take your pick, they all mean the same thing in the end. This is not Ireland. My grandfather, dead these past 25 years.

The rain drizzles, the shower drizzles more rain on my body. Somewhere in the building, another mass of water is being flushed back into the sound, and I stand there soaked up like a sodden cloud in a dry shower, waiting for the toilets to fill up, and the drains to quit backing up.

There's the odor of kelp in the shower stalls, and all I can think about is a woman I made up in a dream, named Jasmina, whose red roses could almost be plucked off her skirt, and she danced to the strains of the guitar. Sangre de Luna. Her kelp hair, thick fistfulls of it, like a prayer rug down her back.

She was in the cantina where you didn't stop off. She invited you in, and you entered like a demon lover. For two dollars you drank all the tequila you could hold, balanced like a tightrope walker on a slack rope, you swing great hunks of sky across the room.

2. But I am telling you this you, you wouldn't remember, you were never there. Jasmine never was a Mexican queen with the silver earrings, in the red skirt who danced for you.

Late in life you decided to take up climbing trees. The apples were as red as the roses on her skirt. You remember the scent of apples that hung heavily in the room. Windows and doors covered with old woolen army blankets. A gift from someone who couldn't pay.

She danced for you. The old record player rasped out a melody. She danced on the fire of the rhythm that beat it's way back into the floorboards and dust seeped into the drinks in the barroom below.

No, you were never there. You woke up in bed alone, a red line running from your ear to your throat. The only thing missing was your pants.

In the next room, the hissing of a needle on the old record, the alcoholic snores of an old man. The spittle, yellowed and dry on the corners of his mouth and the three days growth on his beard contrasted with the oily black smudges on the pillow.

Outside the window, a steady red glare in the water, I am not afraid of its undertow. What if my feet should get stuck under its advancing embrace? What if I had stepped off that ridge? Or in front of the moving car stolen by this kid who ran away from yet another foster home, and the town police knew him by sight?

Only I am hearing the strains of the guitar. I am throwing back my kelp hair and dancing. I have been dancing so long, my feet no longer have shoes. of the light brings about a perpetual day.

The primordial volcanic sun viewed through red smoke and ash. You thought you heard the swish of a skirt, but a seagull lands on the dock and creosote is a kind of oil oozing up from the pores of fallen trees and great lumps of tar float in from the tankers offshore.

And in another part of town, a kid climbs an apple tree. His red shirt does not have roses embroidered on it. From the tree, he can see the ocean and the tankers anchored offshore are old US fleets sold to foreign countries for scrap. He jumps down and runs along the sand singing a song about a dancer named Jasmina.

3. In the Town Tavern you sit and drink down another American beer and see how the sunlight is shining in Victoria across the border. This weather hangs over at the Peninsula like a great shelf fungus jutting out from a tree. Only the clouds are attached to the mountains that raise nearly 8000 feet up from sea level.

Did I tell you I followed one of the canyons in from the ocean. I penetrated deep into the heart of the mountains. At the pass, I turned towards the ridge. A spine of land, and I stood a long time looking down at 2000 feet drop.

On three sides, one step out could've saved me. But I was distracted by the color of flowers growing in a crag, that the mountain goats, for some reason, avoided. There were alpine roses in full bloom, like the ones growing in the Swiss Alps that summer nine years before.

The glacier is retreating. All glaciers over all the continents are retreating, except the one I stood in front of, the Columbia glacier, and I listened to it crack and shudder like some great God trying to get out. His only method of escape was by water, drop by drop. It was as if he waited for summer, a day warm enough, to melt ice, but ot always brought the chill.

I placed my hand on the edge of that dirty blue tongue but could feel no sensation in my fingers, it was more of a burn and ice. My fingers went into my mouth instinctively, like a child.

I am not afraid of the frozen wave of this glacier, or its undertow. What if my feet should get stuck under its advancing embrace? What if I had stepped out off that ridge? Or in front of the moving car, stolen by the kid who ran away from yet another foster home, and the police knew him by sight.

Only I am hearing the strains of the guitar playing. I am throwing back my kelp hair and I am dancing. I have been dancing so long my feet no longer have shoes.

I walked 17 miles in one day just to get out of that valley and away from that cliff. I am barefoot, my calves are swollen. Who is playing the guitar? The room is dark except the red light coming in from the docks. Sangre de Luna. I hear the swishing of skirts. This seagulls are asleep. That red light shining on the water. Sangre. Sangre. Somewhere a man cries out in his sleep the name of Jasmna. The scent of apples hangs heavily in this room.
Port Townsend
7/29/1981

missing final prose hardcopy so it has typos. Needs revision.
See also  SANGRE DE LUNA (poem)
added 12/16

The Woman in Question: A Story

This is a story, someone else's story, not told quite right, almost not told at all, about a man who forgot and what happened because he forgot to remember. It could be a story about the trickster coyote, or it could be the man next door, but most likely it is about your ex-lover whom you never quite forgave and never quite forgot either. However, this is not an essential element of the story. There are no parables, no great hidden truths. But I can't convince you, your opinions are your own. There is always the possibility of meaning derived from the most thinly veiled of stories. This is a story about a man who thought really there was nothing he kept hidden from himself. Like some great body of truth. And of a woman, for no good reason, loved this man. This story is not about the woman who never quite recovered her heart, but of the man who owned his own heart so thoroughly, he knew what he was about. Once upon a time there was a man. What did he forget? Besides the fairytale. He said he never loved the woman and yet he couldn't stop touching her. This went on for years, just touching without feeling. And he said he never loved. Her. An anorexic parable of plenitude denied.

July 1981

SEA URCHINS

Sea urchins, with mouths like Diogenes lanterns.
River otters swim facedown and eat on land.
Sea otters swim on their backs and eat on water
using their chests as tables, they're
madly hammering clams with rocks.
I think of this same stretch of ocean
up and down this coast—from Baja
to the Bering Sea, ah yes, teaching me
of the return, the return. Prodigal.


7/25/1981
Pt. Townsend, WA
added 9/15