Fog Off the Umpqua, Oregon Highway #38

Fog off the Umpqua, Oregon Highway #38

a.
Its wings can dip
through mountainous valleys
of trees, of gray clouds,
then rising, disappear.
Trees create clouds.
Clouds sustain the trees.
One calls to the other.

b.
Where the paved
road stands
mysteriously far off,
in a charmed tangle of reeds,
a heron nips at fog.
Its voice caustic fire.

c.
There is Reedsport,
a greedy speed trap,
after that, the sign
for Loon Lake,
then Scottsburg, Elkton
and Drain rising
where the river curves
into the wing of a hawk
near the rain dark road
wrapped in tendrils of mist.

d.
A tunnel ahead.

e.
There are tales to tell.
Omens. Auguries.
By the side of the road
a crush of crows.
Fragmentary shadows
and scents. A white elk
in front of a herd of deer.
In forest clearings
a congress of watchers
as Morning quakes
her waking brow opening wide
eyed to shake her hair
spilling across the land
in a conflict of upheavals
for beauty is an argument
of exclusion, an oblique lie,
a spectator of lost causes
that may, or may not have happened.

f.
Can language formulate
what silence hides?
There are so many failures.

g.
Uprooted trees, Alder lie
like a jumble of bones
in the shape of a broken crucifix
wrapped in the scent of pine.
To be and go for-
this never ending flow,
then and now, a rising thought
dark in deepness, in memories,
dreams and reflections.
Are you here to please?
Are you trying not to offend?

h.
For thousands of years
the salmon up the Umpqua
swarmed. Each year
there were less of them.
The salmon rotted.
Time wounds all heels.
What does it mean?
Care now. What one thinks.
Tiananmen Square. Kent State.
Our home town
in the children we were,
idealizing at the altar
of what we couldn’t understand.
Now, butter melts in winter Alps
and our own bodily fevers
must destroy to burn.
We think in Manhattanese
of decapitated heads
up from the mouths of bombs.

i.
Self, do not stress
or lean too far.
Yearning for belief,
it is the air we carve
our names into.
The times are veined
as lichens smothering
the pumice burped
Buddha rock
of enlightenment.

j.
A stranger among us. What does it mean?
For those who know the power of the word,
who seek the key that opens the gate
to what must be faced, a house of light within
and may all shadowy impediments dissolve,
for only they who know what is truly lawful
and not lawful can summon spirits of the air,
the earth and under the earth who present
themselves in myriad shapes, for always,
that stranger at your door may be an angel
or a missing child.


Scott Malby

Posted over on A Little Poetry