Everett Poetry Night: March 31, 2025
My Moment in Time
Curving through a basalt cut,
the slim-waisted river brings
waters from the Two Oceans Plateau
at Jackson Lake to the faraway waters
out west, all the way to Astoria.
Cache Peak is due south.
Smooth-sanded alluvial fans
are tan with flecks of sagebrush teal.
To the north, the massive Craters of the Moon
lava fields lie between the river
and the distant mountains of central Idaho.
I stand alone in this isolated spot.
Civilization is nowhere in sight.
Little has changed since the Bonneville Flood
scoured the Portneuf River Valley
at the end of the Ice Age or even
when the first people arrived more
then ten thousand years ago.
This moment by the river—my moment
in time—is a one-of-a-kind snapshot
in the millions of years that some version
of the Snake River flowed to the Pacific.
This tiny stretch of river is not
the complete river any more than lives
exists in isolation apart from all the brothers
and sisters of the past, present, and future.
Like the island in the stream parting the waters,
it isn’t you who travels forward.
The small measure of time meant for you
travels toward you and beyond you.
∞
We All Start at Zero
The practiced hands of the good-humored doctor
pull the infant out of the warm duskiness
of an amniotic ocean into the unfamiliar glare
of delivery room lights. It is a rough business,
coming into the world, but every person
in the room is pulling for the startled new arrival
to survive, grow, thrive, and come of age.
In this instant, we align ourselves with God
to affirm the wholesome generative forces of the world.
We all start at zero. Look at the face
of the newborn child. Where is the theological construct
of original sin? Do you see it? No?
The swaddled baby is laid on the mother’s chest
and begins to learn the ambivalent ways of humankind.
∞
For the Faces I Will Never See
for Nancy at Christmas 2020
Long stretches of handling the hooks*
with rhythmic certainty
seamlessly moving forward on a row
occasionally looking up at a movie
seen before many times
(knowing which scene is coming)
sometimes losing track
of the sequencing cadence
or noticing the row does not look right,
counting, counting, ripping out,
saying a word not safe for work,
re-reading instructions
then back on track,
finishing the main pattern
and refining the border—
the final step—until
done at last!
For the faces I will never see,
you bundled newborns in other arms,
my love goes out to you.
I imagine my yarn
chucked against your chin,
but that is where my story ends.
Wear it well
and pay it forward
for children of your own
if you can.
*Crochet
∞
Our Love
Love instantiates. Twain souls
set out: governed by gravity
sliding scraping muscling through
perilous rapids churning white
bending through forests and fields
beneath the bridges of twelve towns*
gaining girth and losing speed
adding a tinge of toxic sludge
to a whispering flood a mile wide.
From glacial melt to delta salt,
this is who we are.
*twelve towns—San Diego, CA; Long Beach, CA; Pocatello, ID; St. Paul, MN; Seattle, WA; Federal Way, WA; Renton, WA; Germantown, MD; Eugene, OR; Veneta, OR; Redmond, WA; and Lake Stevens, WA.