Elan Mudrow
Smidgens
Ruins Near A Waterfall
Snippets of blue and clouds
Poke through rafters
That once held meaning.
Still, something walks
Within the ruins
Weathered old boots…and
Ashen hands, brushing
Stone, steel, and rust
Feeling along debris
As if it were night
In the summer shade.
Outside, where tourists
Muffle the sound of the falls.
Young summer types
Adorned in shimmering
Glacier melt, current dripping
From plump elbows
Dash about, in the radiance.
Look from the open air
Into worn out windows
Unaware of how much
Walking ghosts do.
The 99 Cent Lady
Her eyes…opaque. If you look into them, she won’t return your greeting. Her sight fixes upon someone who’s not there, as if the air holds a face that no one can see except for her.
In words you don’t trust, she tells you what she sees…the symmetry of shapes, the mistakes of nature, the movement of lips when they sing, the spin of a record playing a song she wishes to forget but aches to listen to…the curl of a handwritten name.
She tells you these things…and when she speaks it’s lucid…as if she’s telling that person, who’s not there, the very thing they need to hear.
(Image entitled Blue Unravelled. Click on it)
Wishpoosh
Denny and I, with his Wasco legs, inside Gifford Pinchot…
Late, when the dust of the gravel road settles, fast, into black…
We cup our hands, to make an old whistle, like the hoot of an owl
To settle our minds, to settle our fears, of the directionless twirl of sky…
Upon hearing the tones from our small soft hands, deer stand still, freeze
Their black pool eyes, resolved, never leave our movements…
And the stars we see above the maze of Douglas Fir
Are old stories still being told anew…
Our voices, with purpose, retell them to each other.
Looking For Goldilocks
We’re measuring distant planets
By the flutter of their stars
By the flicker of the light
That lies
Next to their circumference
Abstracting them down
Into analyzation
Bringing them up to surface
Through <code> </code>
To words, pictures, and meanings
To read them aloud and aloof
To write them as extensible language
Copy and paste our findings
Upon the script
Of our own atmosphere
Marked up upon our own globe
Which sits conveniently
Within grasp for a spin
On the table in the study
Next to the books
Where blue whirls by
With a few rearranging squares
Rectangles, lakes and islands
Fighting for eye contact
We keep our fingertips, lightly
Upon the smooth cold metal surface
Enjoying the texture
As it twists
Through our touch
(image. An unfinished project)
Tectonic Plates
Cathy is in the twilight heat
Before the summer night
Moves like tectonic plates.
She tells me stories
Of shooting people in Vietnam
During the war
The rifle she used is under her bed.
I saw it when she asked me
To feed Molly while on vacation,
Cathy took her wife to Canada
To watch the dwindling caribou migrate.
It’s such a plain rifle, worn
Its wood stain nearly all rubbed off
The barrel dull, black and textured.
She drives hundreds of miles
To watch the caribou.
Cathy is in the twilight heat.
The sun is an orange throb.
She tells me how she used to hunt,
Southeast Oregon, Steens Mountain
Hauled back all of the animal
Limb by limb, organ by organ
Buckets of blood and fat.
I don’t like it when the sunrise is hazy
Cathy throws seeds to two blue jay parents
They’re always uptight, worried,
Especially when Molly chews grass near them.
A grey squirrel gnaws on antlers
In Cathy’s backyard. Antlers decades old.
A sprinkler chases the drought.
Cape Disappointment
Here,
Saddle Mountain from a distance is a few uneven bumps. The jetties appear as pencil marks, drawn outwards towards the sea. The river wants to keep going, to stretch beyond the haze.
A few old growths dot the forest, challenging the wind. They’re loners in a crowd of confused youngsters, hanging onto tales, their bark scoured by rain and salt. I lay a hand upon their exposed skin, smooth, cracked.
Here,
A tattooed girl asks if it’s okay, to break coast guard rules, to continue on, past where the trail is closed, to have a look at Deadman’s Hollow. I smile. No dead men there, just ghosts of ships, who have no souls until their names have been wrecked.
I tell her of swimming the Columbia, dog paddling into sand drifts, frightened, thinking I’ve bumped into a river creature. Then, after feeling the silt move cool between my fingers, calm down. The current plays with this muck, flying apart, then glues it back together. Deadly for ships. I’ve stood upon many, walking, shin deep, in the middle of the watercourse like a river rat Jesus.
Until large ships make their way through the dredged parts of the channel, carrying cars, toys, particle board furniture, and microfiber pants. Their wakes knock me off my river dance. Fallen, I swim with the current, sideways, grasping the mud of the soft shore.
Here,
I think of ship skeletons and the tattooed girl who looks for all the things she will know.
Clay
The shape of our sculptures
The flaws in their forms
The brittleness of their glaze
The density of their mass
The allure of kilns
Click on image to enlarge. “Formation”
The Known
There is this quiet motion
When wind brushes trees,
Branches bend, a timeless marriage…
When there are the smells of summer,
Sticky pine and soft cedar…
When rivers are a language,
Creeping through echoes of green…
When shadows move, slow, deliberate
Undecided between dream and reality…
When the soft ground molds to feet
A carpet compiled by all seasons…
When hands make imprints
In the momentary wet sand…
When mountains are careful
with the selection of words…
(Click on image to enlarge. “The Movement of Lines”)
Flowers And Watchers
The boy picks Wapato in the marsh
Just the top stems, not the tubers.
He doesn’t see me standing
In the mud, watching.
I follow him with quiet eyes
Walk through the marsh.
As if he’s searching for a vase.
There’s a humid wind
Ruffling all plants around us
Including the ones in his hand.
Near us are shy egrets
With their long necks, poking
Among a dried-out lake bed.
They’re not overly timid.
They’ve seen us, hear us
Have no concern
Over flowers or watchers.
As I move, the mud is loud
Echoing off trees, off the sky.
Off of all the moments we are taking.
He disappears behind a cottonwood
And the play of clouds and sun.
My pant legs are caked with soil.
The egrets stick to their search
Of the wet marshland grass.
A small patter of rain hits leaves, branches.
We change again.
Ramona Falls’ Mist
Ramona’s whisper requites us to ourselves—our fires extinguished, our thirst sated.
That voice, a pact between mountain and moisture, is a quiet call to us
The stumbling pilgrims, forest wanderers, wishful sages who suffer from acute chatter.
Its language—slow—near wordless, near nothing, paints upon the brow reminders…
Of lost talk of the ancient shape of myths, wrapped around delicate, heavy truths,
Source of our combined story.
We arrive with city hands, parched
To drink for the first time—again.
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