Chinatown vignettes

Koon Woon Vignettes of Chinatown and Slices of Chinese American Immigrant Life Chinatown, Seattle (a poem) When the light is with you, the dust is behind an old gift shop. Faded memories are displayed in the window. Persistent footsteps have descended these curbs for humbow retreats. Footfall killing time. Frayed stairs of tenements bring down bitter strength. Through alley doors furiously wokking, below Chinatown family association halls. Pigeon feathers and other disorders flutter down these streets. Footfall killing time. On Weller Street roast ducks are hung, headless, dripping fat, next to The Proprietress of Love; three flights of stairs lead to a den of poverty. Unwashed windows face out at tarry streets. Footfall killing time. Construction workers face-lift the train station and the sports dome is about to be imploded. All discussions of dim sum before the tea kettle whistles, drainage pipes complain of rust and leakage on these back streets. Footfall killing time. On a spring day the sun mild and modest, tender green foliage reappear on inner city streets. On a fall day at sundown warm and emberly as the ferry traverses the Puget Sound, the maples turn three or four shades of yellow and brown, when lightly you walk upon these streets, footfall killing time. 1. Rooms and Occupants Up four flights of the rickety, winding stairs of 416½ is a den of poverty in #317. There lives a not-so-recent Chinese immigrant asleep on a cot with a cockroach crawling on his face. He is in a medicated stupor, while the roar of the traffic down on Jackson Street going east and west, and the I-5 freeway likewise rumble over Jackson going north and south. His room has only one window without shades. He uses a cardboard to block out the light. Pushed against the window is a small restaurant table, the kind for a solitary customer. On his table is an opened book, Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabakov. Come to think of it, this old hotel is a firetrap. But because of the grandfather clause, this hotel doesn’t have to be up to code to have inhabitants. In the next tenement #319, an old frail man is coughing, while reading the Longacres’daily racing form, before he will negotiate the stairs and out the narrow double entrance doors of this tenement to catch the bus to the racetrack. Built in 1920, ostentatiously called the Republic Hotel, when there was a lot of money floating around in Seattle, and in the 1930’s, it sported an all-night dancing ballroom. The old man is thin and tubercular, but he is still smoking. He washes his clothes in his room and hangs it on a wire to dry. To the left side of #317, the occupant of #315 is a svelte youngish woman, who has just finished eating a bowl of sweet barley soup and is blow drying her long black hair, minutes before she has to rush off to catch a bus downtown to transfer to Virginia Mason Hospital where she is a housekeeper. The able-bodied tenants have gone to work in restaurants and garment shops. Some old tenants are babysitting their grandchildren. Here they are hidden from Chinatown streets. The occupant of #317 is taking his afternoon nap. He has a mental disorder, and his medication tires him easily. He has been reading all morning because he is taking a correspondence course in autobiographical literature from the University of Washington. He had lunch not long ago, lunch that he had cooked on the hot plate. He had rice and fried bacon rinds. The cooking grease odors make the roaches active. One is now crawling on his forehead. He is oblivious to the world. When Shui washed her bowl in #315, the bowl that held her sweet barley soup, she rinses it several times more than necessary in her basin in the corner of the room. The room measures 10 feet by 12. This is the total sum of her real estate besides the communal tubs at the ends of the hall and the communal toilets. She even has to bring her own toilet paper. Now she opens her door, gets out, locks it, and then checks it. Then once assured that it is secured, she starts running down the hallway and down the tenement stairs. Out on Seventh Avenue South when she pushes open the tenement doors, she runs to King Street and runs downhill to 4th Avenue South to catch any of the buses that go downtown, where she will transfer on a bus to go to work. She wears a blue windbreaker, making her a streak of blue in the rusty streets of Seattle Chinatown. She shields the sun from her face with the left hand holding a folded newspaper to her forehead. People turn and stare. She is also oblivious to the pedestrians and drivers on King Street and her only thought is to get to work on time. There just never seems to be enough time to get everything done. There’s always so much washing to do. The tenants hang their hand-washed laundry on the fire escape, different colors like the different flags of the U.N. But poor Chinese immigrants have little representation in America, let alone the U.N. 2. Introduction to Mr. K There’s what the sociologists called the “drift-down theory,” that is, the mentally ill and the less able drift down the economic rung until they find the level at which they can function and operate. And so according to the logic of this theory, the people in Chinatown, albeit it is a glittering ghetto, are there because they can’t function anywhere else… And so when K, the occupant of #317, wakes up because he has to go and urinate, he goes down the hall to the communal toilet stall. He normally counts as he urinates. This time it is a count of thirty. He counts like this: one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two, one thousand…and so on and he finishes urinating at the count of thirty. So, he knows that he has been urinating roughly about thirty-seconds. After zipping up, he goes over to the window in the alcove that leads to the fire escape for a breath of air. He absent-minded looks down on Jackson and 7th Ave. S. and sees a military tank coming up the street. It looks like a tank wants to stop and take up position. Just then, a motorcycle police speeds up and escorts the tank up Jackson Street. K wonders whether they wanted to blow up the Republic Hotel. But he doesn’t think about that for long, for he wants to get back to his correspondence course. He is taking a course called Autobiographical Literature, and now he is reading Franz Kafka’s letter to his father, a very convoluted and detailed letter like a legal brief. The rug on the tenement hallway is thin and frayed. Passing by the manager’s and #319, he enters into his room and sits down at the only chair in the room at the only table and it is pushed against the only window. He likens the window to the eye of Cyclops on the world. He boils some water on the hot plate for some instant Folgers coffee. Folgers is the cheapest brand he could find. He goes back into his reading, making notes, and occasionally, a cockroach would crawl around the bookshelf above the bed to the left of the table. The small table also serves as the dining table and for writing letters to his Uncle in China. He writes one letter every two months in very rudimentary Chinese, since he only studied five years of grammar school in China before he emigrated to join the rest of his family here in the U.S. He moved into Chinatown when he left the crack house in the University District five years ago. Immediately his rent dropped $130 a month, and with that he was able to take a correspondence course every six months and have a little bit of money to send to his Uncle. Meanwhile, cars go up and down Jackson Street down below and their chrome gleamed aggression. And there are enough sirens here to last a lifetime. The police station of the South Precinct is only five blocks away; the fire station is only a few blocks away and the hospital is just up the hill. And in the morning, the huge, long Gais’ Better Bread truck negotiates its way up Jackson. And buses roll down the street, and finally, he began seeing homeless people sleeping on the top of the building across the street, a foreign car garage… A Moment in My Rented Room (a poem) Sometimes I think of myself as an astronaut In my compact, rented room and look upon the bookshelf With its deep mathematics books for deeper space As from a voyage from which one cannot return. Then multiply by several million men who cannot marry, Men who cannot own homes, or to work, or to go to college. This is almost equal to the space effort. But why all that money? I can go to Pluto just by Being in a bad mood. Sometimes I think of the loneliness of deep space In my rented room. The neighbors have busily gone off to Epsilon Centauri or Galaxy X-2137 or to the 7 – Eleven. Sometimes I look at my 16-oz. jar of coffee; I know What the minimum daily requirements are. Cybernetics Steers me to avoid collisions with black holes or stars, And my hot plate sustains me with pinto beans and bacon rinds, And on my mini stereo, always the Blue Danube. It is rainy today. My room is a bastion . I am filing The sparse bars of prison. I am building a mental atom bomb. I am designing spaceships. Multiply this by several millions. 3. Miss Miao “My sad friend,” Miao sighed, “It is my misfortune you are unable to work and I have to garment shop work and cannot go real school.” She said this when the English ESL tutoring session was over. She still had to hand-wash her laundry and to hang them in her room. She normally obtains water through a hose from the corner washbasin of her tenement room, with the water separated into two plastic buckets she retrieved from a restaurant nearby, one bucket with soap and the other one holds water for rinsing. K would sit at the edge of her cot and converse with her and she would sit on a small stool and wash away, underwear and all right in front of him. They were both from Canton. He had come twenty-five years earlier as a young boy. There was little pretense between them. K told Miao he would marry her if he could. Miao had been a police clerk in Canton. One time when K explained a new vocabulary word to her, she suddenly searched under her bed. Among the boxes of papers and notes she found just the right piece of paper and the exact word under discussion. Her father, who lived in the adjacent room, had been a minor official in China that was imprisoned by “The Gang of Four.” Miao explained it this way: “One time my old father was a little bit crazy. He thought all the radios and speakers were saying, ‘Old Kuang, you are a bad man.’ My father went to hide in a garage. And after a long, long time, I looked for my father and found him, and I say ‘Father, it is all right now, you come home.’” One day Miao was working at the garment shop near the Kingdome stadium when she went out into the hall and ran into Kathy, who owned the Artex import company, which operated out of the warehouse a floor above the garment shop. Kathy is Taiwanese Chinese and since Miao speaks Mandarin, they got talking. “How is your English?” Kathy asked. Miao said that she is studying ESL at Seattle Central College and that she had a tutor. Kathy then asked, “How is your memory?” Miao said her memory is normal. “Good!” Said Kathy, “You need to remember many items of imitation leather vinyl goods for office products we receive and ship. There is some moderate lifting and some faxing requiring elementary English. I do need someone. Would you like to try?” By a stroke of luck, Miao became a warehouse shipping clerk. Rather than to work with forty other noisy women in a hot stifling room, Miao now is able to work alone in a cool warehouse with more of a future. Miao’s enthusiasm for learning English was doubled. 4. More at the Tenement Crazy Hom, his schizophrenic wife, and challenged daughter live in #321, just around the corner from the communal toilet and tub in the east end of the apartment building. The daughter sorts plastic poker chips and flings them into the metallic bins. K hears this “bing, bing” when he goes by to go to the alcove for air. This time in his life, he smokes two packs of Camel straights a day, down to the bitter end so that his fingertips and fingernails are yellowed. And living in such a small room, he needs to get out once in a while for the feeling of space. But he is manning his fort as his paranoia saw the entirety of Chinatown as being run by gangsters who employ the martial artists and their students for protection racketeering. He doesn’t even feel safe among his “own” people. In fact, his life had been threatened by a two-bit punk, a self-appointed vigilante Chinese. The day K got a job as the English reporter for the Seattle Chinese Post, he received a telephone call from a certain semi-public figure. The call was a threat. “Hey, listen,” said the caller. “Because you live in Chinatown, we won’t bother you, but if you write nonsense, you know what’s going to happen to you.” K knew what the caller meant. He did not reply, and the caller hung up. K decided to write about Chinese furniture, dim sum, Chinese jade, and innocuous things. He did not investigate gambling and money-laundering and exploitation of recent immigrants in sweatshops and restaurants. He got paid thirty dollars for an article, which takes him a week to assemble together. But that is ten percent of his monthly disability income. When he received the first check, he took his cousins to lunch. They had just arrived from China. Faye, upon seeing her cousin’s handwriting, said, “Your writing is as cursive as chicken intestines.” Faye and Zhu are his female first cousins on his mother’s side. He began teaching them English and his mind was thus brought back to a certain amount of reality as he interacted with them. A mentally ill person needs social support, his therapist told him. “When you are paranoid or depressed, go where there are people around.” That was the advice of Miss Chan, his therapist on a work visa from Hong Kong. (To be continued…)

Poem _______________ Koon Woon

 

When you, when I …

 

When you catch me writing,

when you catch the wind,

a warm breath is blowing, &

birds flock over the land.

 

Though the political is absurd

and men often pitch dirt,

a raindrop of the good

portends a brotherhood.

 

Take this feather, my friend,

it’s preserved from childhood.

Recall fondly the days and nights

in this undertaking we call life.

 

When you, when I are far awake,

an opulent music we shall make.

And we will laugh and dance, as

Providence bestows another chance.

 

Koon Woon

David Gilmour _________________ two poems

 

DREAM-DOG

 

 

Say, it was vivid! -- akin to something --

Someone alive and kicking.

I know I should have caught that 4:11 am

Dream lingering at the empty platform,

When I sat bolt upright, I saw myself

As if myself saw me in the high-

Density reflective mirror of that world.

A crisis whether to arise,

Dress, eat, and climb aboard the blank page;

Whether to drop back down the rabbit's hole to sleep.

 

Had it, fed it, bled it, died!

Alas, that frisky puppy of a dream-dog

Up and abandoned me. Carried on a carriage,

Taken on the brain-train,

Chuffing on down those serpentine tracks

Until the rails went skew,

Now's blowing smoke in distant fields

Where poetic frogs used to croak.

 

Through channels reamed by rumination,

The barge hangs by some mooring post,

Along by now a narrow ditch, a psychic lair

Where something more than frog was spawned,

Where it's at home,

Like simple souls a while ago,

Who chattered, smoked, and sipped green tea

Over yellow formica breakfast tables,

Morning sun in streams of gold,

Through the hazy kitchen windows.

 

 

 

TRANCE FORMATION

 

The cosmic picture or the uncosmetic chaos

Is pressed by the spirit of Life

Upon the walls of its own awareness.

Rainbow arcs, moon above the pyramids,

Cliff faces, glassy mountain ribs.

The listener might see a spectral fragment,

The large red,

A lamp glowing upon a triangular plane,

A rough stone, tragic ledges,

A dead drop into blue chasms.

 

Nature’s mass can be reordered:

Coherent line, measure, form, and word.

The singer’s synesthetic eye,

A wild iris, savage thought.

A maelstrom of meanings:

Pristine is white,

Black is pure, men are wheat,

Women violets with a deep, deep core.

Raven, a nightjar,

And a sign of spring—cuckoo!

 

All concocted transformations,

Laden galleons sailing across classifications

To an unknown shore,

The blades from bristling pines

Palming the foaming eddies,

Skimming across orders

To an ineffable shore,

Down to earth experience,

Amber and frankincense.

 

Out they fly from the cave of dreams,

Carlsbad-like gusts of plumage,

Beauties once worn by cargo cultists

Now extinct in paradise

In faraway Sarawak.

 

Soaring,

Focusing on all divine planes,

Swift squadrons,

Drawing evening in,

  

koon woon

"The Warsaw Pact" by Koon Woon

 

The Warsaw Pact

 

There are losers from Eastern Europe living in this apartment building, as well as Asians, and Blacks and a couple of indigenous people. We are sometimes a conflicting community. But the Whites, albeit poor, rule. The Russian is seldom home for this reason? I am China-born Chinese and my age should command respect, but it doesn’t. Things are not like they are in the old country.

 

In some ways, this is a Jean-Paul Sartre story. There are a few viable exits and so we wait for Godot. Sometimes one can smell death coming on and sometimes one can narrow it down to which of the nine floors. And when an occupant is not seen for a prolonged period of time, their worried relatives will find a putrefying mess in that room. And so it goes, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

 

It seems though that the formula 3% Chinese living here is both admired and resented. According to Emily the Black lady with one functioning eye, the Whites and the Chinese got all the money. It could be so, but the Chinese who don’t play along with the white agenda remain in Chinatown, where massage parlors mushroom in recent times when smuggled aliens are well hidden in the Chinatown conclave where the police seldom assess unless it is horrendous enough of a crime such as Wah Mee.

 

There are all kinds of misconceptions here, of course. Approximately half of the people here are disabled and of those, half are mentally ill, and the other half are seniors enough they either don’t care or unable to care. But it is like Roethke’s “Root Cellar,” the Congress of stink here struggles to survive.

 

(To be continued…)

 

- Koon Woon

January 7, 2022

 

John Gorski ______________ three poems

 

SUNDAY, JANUARY 9, 2022

John Gorski -------------- three poems

 

Questioning Poets

 

Queries for Keats

 

Why did you walk through twenty-five

miles of November rain

in a flimsy springtime waistcoat,

immune to thoughts insane?

Did you think death was no more

than a laudanum dream –

an apparition murmuring

of that not fully seen?

 

But you knew it had arrived

like the Italian sun

in your fevered rooms in Rome

of breathless consumption.

Did you ever hear portents

in the nightingale’s song

that you wouldn’t live to Wordsworth’s age

or even half as long?

 

A Query for Clare

 

Why did bird song stay in your head

from Emmingsale’s heath

where Night Jars called and the hawk

whistled like a thief?

You didn’t heed the cold-eyed

men of science in London

who peered through the sterile glass

at the corpses of robins.

 

Ignorant henchmen of commerce

lived in that city,

their black thorn hearts icy toward

avian poetry.

How could they hear other bird tunes

as nightingale music

which you still heard within the walls

that housed lunatics?

 

2021                                         John Gorski

 

 

Childhood Idles

 

Teddy Bricks, my one-time ursine companion,

slouches in a corner chair – his faded green

vest and feathered Robin Hood cap askew.

His metal limbs are old and twisted.

When I wind him up, he can no longer

execute his mechanical somersaults.

Sad in disrepair, he commiserates

with my sister’s bear, Teddy Bebe,

who’s grown pudgy and moth eaten.

 

Now they rest in the spent morning’s

shadows, as I reach for my shoe box

of baseball cards. I shuffle the smiles

and stances of Walt Dropo, Elroy Face,

Ted Kluzewski and Yogi Berra through my hands.

 

After lunch, I go out to our back yard

with my bat and rubber ball and pretend

to be Gene Woodling – the only Baltimore

Oriole hitting over 2.60. I’m swinging

for the fences (sixty feet away) and

trying to hit that red orb all the way

to Glen Burnie (a half mile away).

 

Through the kitchen window, the Coasters

harmonizing “Young Blood” draws me out

of that August Maryland swelter to drop

a lemon-lime Fizzie in a glass of ice water.

Then, I look through my collection

of Rhythm and Blues trading cards

to see if I can find one of The Coasters

among Laverne Baker, Little Richard and Elvis.

 

At twelve years, I finally learn

to ride a bicycle and pedal out

with my friends to beaches on the Severn River.

There, I watch sails billow over glittering

liquid blue towards Chesapeake Bay.

 

2021                                                       John Gorski

 

 

 

Hamilton County Purgatory

 

    “He would have convicted Jesus Christ too,” the thirtyish

Corrections official exclaimed when he saw me enter

the third floor of the Hamilton County jail. I had just come

from the Common Pleas court of Donald White where I was

found guilty of possession of marijuana – still a felony in 1970.

    I guess I looked innocent in my suit and tie and Ivy League

short hair. I said, “ I think I’ll get probation because I’m

going to college.” “So, you’re smarter than the average bear,”

he shot back, using the culturally dated TV lingo typical of the

Ohio River valley.

     Then a guard escorted me to my cell and I met the other

occupant, who was waiting to be remanded to a hospital

for the criminally insane. Other detainees drifted into my cell

over the next twelve days. Some would be going to the Ohio pen.

Some asked if I had brought any weed with me. Of course, I hadn’t

since “I was smarter than the average bear.”

     During that time, I met an assortment of interesting people. One

of them was in for smuggling. He was from my high school and a first

string member of the basketball team. He told me about my senior

class president who got busted with two others for smashing a plastic

statue of a llama in a city park. The llama was stuffed with

packets of hashish. Another was a member of a motorcycle gang

who discussed the merits of eating grasshoppers. One got drunk

and forged a check.

     One day, the warden let us watch an old black and white B movie

from the forties. In it, a gang of convicts were on a train chugging

over an elevated railroad bridge when one of them was thrown

from the train. Everyone cheered.

     On Sundays, Top 40 radio was piped in over the public address

system. Melanie wailed “Candles in the Rain” while someone said:

“That white girl sounds kind of weak; why can’t they play Aretha.”

Then Norman Greenbaum was singing “Spirit in the Sky.” I closed

my eyes and saw myself in a dark earthen cellar, looking up at

a door flooding with white light. It reminded me of reading

Pilgrim’s Progress where the pen and ink sketched sun seemed

to expand at the end of every chapter.

     Then one day the guard said I was getting out tomorrow. The next

morning, the “key” arrived in the form of a probation officer. It seemed

“The Curse of Harry Anslinger” was beginning to lift and the 1930’s era

marijuana laws were receding.

     Then my father arrived and we rode into a pulsing March morning of

of rainy light. After two weeks in windowless halls, it lifted me in a rhapsody.

That night the purgatory of jailed voices vanished from my sleep.

 

2021                                                                                         John Gorski

 

 

 

 

 

David Gilmour

 

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2021

David Gilmour

 Encounter with Frogs

What is an impression worth?

A frog.  And a jar of ruddy leeches.

When I say “frog,” I think “Frogs.

Frogs are good to think.”

The matter of frog experience first floats

Then sinks mostly unknowable, spuriously

Into the spawning pond of memory.

It’s a rich seminal soup, full of eyes,

Magnified, each a natural universe.

These eyes are vocal once they spring

Breaking through the skin of things. 

In season, everywhere. Then they’re out.

Wonders of compromise, they extend themselves

To bridge the poles of water world and padded land.

And the extensions can be perceived from the eyes

As orderly change, clear and strange,

As leggy fish with iguana tails,

As animals flying on all fours,

Fully outstretched, twice their size,

Jumping, climbing piggy-back,

Unabashedly clambering onto one another’s backs,

Orange on orange, green on green,

Clinging colorfully, eyes bulging,

They seem a surprise even to themselves.

When they leap

From the dense compact of bone and skin,

The plastic tapestry

Takes shape. As lightning bolts or spotted lilies on fresh

                                                                                            green waters.

Frogs.

Frogs are naturally good to think,

To take inside as part of insubstantial life,

Changing order, cruising the classifications.

Their song defeats the ears, allegro!

The rhythmic noise communicates,

Encroaching on all other senses,

Setting forth reverie:

       Bullrushes,

                           Against the moon and stars,

    Spiked grasses on the mirror lake,

                             Edging the weeds, where

Sedge warblers are sleeping on blue eggs. 

The scene you see cannot be forced,

Cannot be tidily arranged

By science or dulling habit.

My eyes within no longer truly see.

There they swim in thicker waters,

As Comets,

Shooting across the neural galaxies,

Where they re-connect icons.

      From a blade of grass, the rest:                

                                                                    The moon,

                        Stars 

                        Pond

    Echoing ripples across

                         Shattering the constellations,

Ruffling the lily pad

                And its camping amphibious motility.

Making the connections symphonic, concrete,

Like visiting forgotten shrines,

So much depends on Memory.

Glazed frogs transporting—déjà vu—

Faint essences to flush meadowlarks

From the nesting spirit

To wild flights of fancy.

Each a winged message,

Calling, answering unasked questions.

My gaze, pilgrim in a landscape

Painting itself inside,

Inviting me to choose the color and the brush.

This is a risky business,

Uninhibited mind-blooming,

Thinking

On the odd chance a relevant word

Will leap the illogical impasse.

                                      by David Gilmour

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Day Hike, Whidbey Island                                                                       

                (for Joy)                                                                             

 

 

On the prairie’s far north side we strike

   the bluff trail, wind lush with salt,

with stories pried from kelp.

 

Or have we always owned their song?

   An eagle glides forty feet above us,

wings held aloft without a quiver.

 

Dark as anthracite, it drifts toward terrain  

   only it can occupy, more stunning

than even the lagoon trapped between beach

 

and bluff.  When we pause by a stark,

   sun-bleached log I see beyond you

the path it takes, the descent into myth,

 

a port I long to visit.  No, not visit—

   recover.  Fling my net over a dream

claimed as birthright, a child’s first realm.

 

Baseball, fairy tales, hazelnut trees atop

   a wild ravine—all food to nourish

the living no less than a prodigal rain.

 

Like this bird’s passive flight.  Such creatures

   open us like shells.  What tide must

we invoke to cross the water? 

 

Perego’s Trail at Ebey’s Landing

 

A few miles from home, our get-away from months

Of melancholic habitation,

Dolorous rounds of merest metabolism,

Out here, even flat fields lay as still wonders,

Farmed prairies leveled in spring plantings,

Inspiring us out of ourfallow bodies like clouds

About to burst after too much drinking in the dark.

 

Was high time for two of us to center on one

From perverse suburban cycles of delivery and receipt,

To get up for some other purpose than habit presents.

Across from Coupeville on the Whidbey map, Perego’s Trail,

Ascending on the outermost edge of the yellow bluff, took us,

Upward from Ebey’s Landing, hundreds of feet, treading

The line between the wild and the good, the lower Straits

Opposite Dungeness and cultures plats of Sherman’s Land.

Out of limbo we trod the path toward the north where

Perego’s brackish ponds limn the narrow strand below,

Heaped around with drifted logs and scraggly stumps

Once bound for Skagit mills.  Claims in every direction

Had been named with history’s lumber, now standing

In shacks and mansions that coursed down rivers

Into weirs and settled at last vagabond in tamed banks

With tired sailors’ dreams for safe landings and boarding

A welcoming community nestles in.

 

From the beach, the trail rose northward up sturdy planks,

Switch-backing to land, then angling west to the Sound,

Narrowing to the line climbing the lower bluff’s rim,

Where at stations crude benches were set for those soon weary.

Our eyes askance, we strode past turning points, glancing

Out to sea at fingertip islands and the peninsular thumb

Of the giant who held the Sound as a mirror in his palm.

Climbing still to take the trail where the air hummed

In the pockets of morning sun, music of a million bees,

Dancing on cello wings, busy among the dog rose, pink

Gems on hedges, spikey, thick and green against the fields

Of fox tails waving to the east as we glanced that way.

 

At first the swath was worn by companies into three

Tracks: one clear, black sand; the two beside it, matted grass,

Leading us up past Sherman’s rich green acres to the right

And higher over the gray shingled shore to the left, where

Covered heads and backs crouched low, combing the leavings

By the driftwood webbing that snagged worthless treasures

Brought in by last night’s rough tide.

 

Luminous the calm waters over Admiralty Inlet spread constant,

Vast splendor of the fading turquoise horizon of Juan de Fuca Straits.

Gleaming furrows of the tilled fields had a distant meeting

Beyond the red-winged blackbird balancing on the fence line.

Rising further, the path retreated along the wild ridge, stitched

In firs and patches of Oregon Grape merging on shimmering borders,

The nature of our minds wakened in the see-saw of thought,

As the brown buntings we noticed hovering before, alighted

Like illusionists on the soft silk of fragile stalks,

Waving light as air, bowing them double with their scant weight,

A moment’s bare clinging, then snapping like catapults into the breeze.

Emotion arising, the whistle of the blackbird perched on the post,

Grass heads brushed against our calves and feather ticked the bends

Of our knees, as bees led the way before our feet, without a drone,

At controlled and reasoned distance from our slowing footfalls.

Upward. Upward.

 

Throbbing reflections on the dappled turquoise below met a bluing line

Where a solitary seal arced over and glided in its elemental quest

Out into the darker depths.

 

Throbbing reflections penetrating the inward currents

Washed the outer gleam from wide-eyed questioning—

What is that within me, self-directed in what direction?

Who is behind me?

                      Two hundred feet up we stood to gaze behind

At the boomerang arc of the strand stretching back.

 

Here, the grasses flattened down near the bluff’s edge

Brought us to rest on the next rise of the narrowing path.

Lying supine,

We closed our lids to the blue dome.

A purple ceiling of the temple with a yellow eye pulled away

From my being, taking all noise, purpose, and thought,

Carried aloft on an ethereal balloon beyond geometry,

As Apollo might have lifted off once from his Delphic throne.

 

She, my wife not the oracular priestess type, lay suspended

In her temple at my side, always more practical, stirred

When she heard the drone of an airplane

Flying too close to her distant reveries,

or else the wind came and so the stars began to fizzle

as the breeze mounted against the cliff and strummed upon the grasses.

Then it grew quiet as a desert.

 

The first fire nearby was a simple, pink rose she plucked

To savor in her cupped hands the warm, sweet balm

And held it close for me to breathe, her eyes closing,

Indicating much more than the closing of the lids, that,

Bending down, in that floral bowl I watched for stars

Until her hands withdrew the fiery scent.

Sun at zenith, dazzled by the sky, righting ourselves

We faced further north, resuming the rhythm in earnest.

 

Epics took place between our feet.

Ranks of frantic ants crossed the trail, swimming

Through the dusty track, risking all the tribe.

One loner clung to the head of an upturned pill-bug,

Writhing like a many legged turtle, ant legs

Scrambling in the sandy grains, yanking at its load,

Going, going nowhere, getting but getting nowhere,

Just like Sisyphus.

 

A spider lay crumpled in the corrugated treads of a biker’s

Tire marks.  A centipede, two inches of coild black chain

Wound around itself, a sun spiral in eclipse.

The trail twitched with injured insects as we rose

To the bluff’s height, where the wind was harping

A new harmony among the tattered pines.

 

Eerily, to the seaward, as if clawing a my ear,

An eagle held itself braced on the updraft,

Mere yards distant, wings rattling like bronze quills.

I heard no kite like it for stability,

And I saw its eye, an eye that truly looked,

I watched that eye looking, seeing, back at me,

Its acetylene stare, fearless and knowing,

Auspicious, tranquil as a living angel with a heavy brow,

Whose gaze transfixed me like alost lamb.

In one hovering moment, I felt a free-fall

Before the sky lightened again and turning away

Its beak with smoother-back white hair,

This propitious surfer dropped downward toward the shore

Following the arc of the bay, doubled by itsown gray ghost

Cast upon the shingle beach below,

Remaining in the open air, while I walked on in stumbling gait.

 

The wind dropped.

The water now so calm a kayaker might course crossways

Over the ultramarine veins of the inlet.

Small birds bobbed in the shallows.

Cormorants dove and held their search so long

We lost track.

Gulls, absent till now, rained down in shrieks of panicked

Consternation, fighting for a space

In the feeding ring around the gamboling seal.

 

Above Perego’s Lake, the trail ended and turned

Downward steeply to the beached whales of driftwood.

It was living on this edge, and transitions were made

In a moment.

Either we trace back the way we came or one carefully placed

Foot-fall down and bridge began to form that way.

 

She held my shoulders from behind, and together we made descent

As a centaur might onecehave ventured down a slope

When Triton’s horn called the dancers to the laughing waves.