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Michael Daley

Reluctantly

There is walking, there is flowing, and there is a moment 
when a mountain gives birth to a mountain child.
                                                             —Dogen


Long before we moved here, 
neighbors who could 
bought up this cliff above Burrows Bay
where the archipelago’s international border of kelp 
undulated north 
in tides not then acknowledged as The Salish Sea.

When a torrent uprooted prehistoric trees, 
a muddy plunge swiveled foundations.
Property lines lost midair, driveways hosed away,
flood split the cliff open like a butcher’s hacksaw.

This house, our house now, teetered above the new ravine.
Young maples, licorice fern, mounds of chaotic salmonberry
waggled downstream,
packed the drenched meadow below. 

Thirty years later, 
alder so high we no longer see Mount Erie
though it’s been walking for a long time.
I said I’d 
climb down that gully with my chainsaw.
I’ve said so 
every spring, and finally do 
skid a little down there,
fall one sapling, 
bleed on voracious thorns,
and claw my way back uphill.

To the kitchen table for a cup of tea.
Where my arms quiver—years of strength 
wasted away. 


I was reluctant to hire them,
though our alder ranged
four feet higher
than last year,
the view lost of
centuries old
hemlock and fir,
Sugar Loaf’s dome, 
crisp tilted meadows.

The three men—
first crew to crawl down into my moveable gully, 
chainsaws slicing green wood,
jefe fifty years younger than I am
joking so fast most of his language runs right past me—
daylight yard workers,
they sing out 
on our dead-end.

I should haul these limbs myself, 
I would say,
but I’m weak as this kitten at the window 
watching what ragged stumps they leave 
near my neighborhood’s clipped lawns, leaf blown and swept.


Checkbook in hand, poised for signature—this is 
a low-wage good deal under the table—
I could say
I can buck up those branches and twigs, but
would it matter?

Islands 
still sway in the evening glare.
Another forest looms along the ridge.
Rivers and rain keep 
pounding down the steep descent
of worn footprints as the skyline’s 
storm clouds broil again southwest of here.

Sean Ewing Crimson_Elegance.jpg

THE COURTSHIP OF WINDS

© 2015 by William Ray

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