The Botanist
From the bus, she bird-walked
the narrow parking strips,
green Edens of wildness,
bent to pick the plants---
stalk, root and flowers
to be pressed between wax,
to be named from Ada Georgia’s Manual of Weeds.
Each specimen labeled, its seed splayed.
She gathered the unwanted,
the uninvited adventurers,
the wanderers, windswept weeds
from overgrown parking strips.
She called them by their common names
and by their Latinate, meadow butter cup, Ranuculus acris,
common chickweed, Stellaria media,
yarrow, Achillea
Millefolium,
and mother’s heart, capsella
Bursa-pastoris
which grows everywhere.
The pages she gathered
in black notebooks which grew fat
with weeds as she wandered farther
afield and returned triumphant,
her face flushed, her hat askew,
a clutch of bane in her hands.
She found them beautiful,
as she found beauty
in the uninvited and unexpected,
like the errant husband
everyone said should go
but stayed, like the five
children that filled
her noisy messy rooms.
Sigrun
Susan
Crash
A logging crew got there first,
found the crumbled wreck.
They left in the pilot’s seat the body
of my father with his broken head,
behind him, my mother
with her last words whispered.
They lifted out the living man
and the living woman,
put them on solid ground,
relayed back for help
for survivors, ambulances
out of Port Angeles.
They heard this machine,
death roaring out of the sky,
destroying all before it---
trees toppled, limbs shirred
and scattered, then the crash---
wings torn off the plane,
the plane half buried and smoking---
twisted metal wreckage.
This crew had seen bad luck,
a man pinned by a fallen snag,
a choke-chain unset,
a fall from a tree climb, but this—
That night driving home one logger
saw a vision of a plane hurtling down
at him, another dreamed he was the pilot,
another dreamed of falling over and over.
The hurt had cut its way into them,
as it did into tree bark, left it’s scars.
For what they
witnessed at the site,
for what they saved,
for what they could
not save,
for what they salvaged
and brought out,
Bless them.
Cathedral
I would rise and go there
to see the place
that swallowed them,
where their spirits entered.
Somewhere on that mountain side
stand witnesses- fir, cedar,
hemlock, among salal,
sword fern, gorse and granite.
I would go on foot to find them,
cut my way up through the brush,
listen for the silence
they found that final day.
I could not look before
at the place where the plane fell,
nosed its way to earth to rest,
wings torn from its dragonfly body.
I will not see scars on the trees-
by now the forest has claimed
and covered all.
The undergrowth filled in---
chokeberry, brambles, fern.
Wounds healed over, bark
thickened, but scars are deep
and burn under the skin.
But they’re not here.
Restless spirits,
they wait at the crest of the mountain,
or near the river’s mouth
where the stones are polished smooth,
and berries are sweet in the sun,
where the salmon run and the catch is good.
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