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.
