Passing The Dalles
The Columbia canyon
still startles, down
the riverside highway
toward home.
On the first railcars east from Portland,
striving artists had packed their darkrooms,
fragile plates and chemicals, to seek
the first fantastic images
of a new empire’s cutting edges,
a wilderness empty, for all they knew,
of native markets and festivals,
any extant history but myth.
For me the river’s power
is stored from early exposure
to those silvered photographs:
terrible rapids and falls
I could never have seen
since the dam went in,
in fifty-seven.
Above the pacified waters
roadside markers now advise:
prebiblical floods cut this gorge
no more than a moment ago,
no more than a scratch to the earth.
Mark C. Jensen
NOTE: Passing The Dalles was originally published in the journal In Layman’s Terms.
Fugue in Green
Twice, on my way to Upper Queets Valley - -
a dead end with a ranger station
(in season) as far as the map detailed - -
I had to stop the car to drag
fallen branches from the gravel road,
though I recalled no great winds of late.
I didn’t expect much company
when I arrived that slate gray day,
fair for February, from what
the towering conifers left
of the sky. Sound too seemed to recede
into baffles and spongey earth.
With no one close to consult,
I walked down one trail, but it soon
submerged beneath a flowing sheet
of clear water, clover-green vines
thriving below the surface, although
I couldn’t make out the type.
So I turned another way, drawn
from chamber to chamber
as if in a cave or maze,
imagining tales my kids
might have made from moss-draped
monsters and ghostly elk. Now dampness
blurred the boundaries between
the states of matter, growth and decay;
fungi grew in crescents at the edges
of vernal pools; windfallen
trunks trellised and nourished
hosts of their successors.
Mark C. Jensen
NOTE: Fugue in Green was originally published in the online journal Parks and Points.
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