Shasta Slope
—Poems and Photos by Katy Brown, Davis, CA
CLIMBING HILLS
just out of Burney, my ears popping,
the road cuts through white layers
of chalk. I am in the realm
of ancient volcanos: Shasta, Lassen.
The pressure of altitude makes my ears
ache—pressure from elevation above
sea level, while all around me, chalk strata
murmurs of an ancient sea bottom.
Ancient secrets formed in early darkness
thrust skyward into mountain sunlight
by subterranean volcanic forces—
deep sediment restless in time.
LESSON OF THE HAWK
I watched her land on the very top
of a swaying cedar tree
with the sun, bright behind her.
I recall the hawks my brother kept
when I was just a child. The
two injured hawks he helped
rehabilitate from the injuries
that took them from their flight.
They resented being weak.
I remember the fierceness
of their look: warriors, seeking
a way back to the gathering clouds.
They returned to the mountain wind,
with lessons of the almost-loved.
Tenderness is a luxury of the hunted.
The hawks soared beyond
the need for gentleness:
reclaimed their untamed hearts.
Abstract Red
I have an ugly scar
where they stopped my heart
and cracked me open like a lobster.
Nearly 20 years ago, they plucked
my stunned heart from its dark
place behind my breastbone,
mended it, and put me back together
with surgical grommets and sutures.
My mended heart remembers old wounds.
Injuries that I thought I’d buried rise like ghosts
to haunt dreams, stalk reverie, attach meaning
to current incidents—the heart is a dynamo,
generating a charge that attracts memory.
Scars of a wounded heart run deep.
They cut through bone to reach my heart—
bone and the ramparts I’d carefully constructed
all my life to wall-in memory, to wall-out risk:
my defenses, physical and emotional—breached.
The wounded heart will take revenge for such affront.
EVENING IN COASTAL REDWOODS
They move through these woods,
the spirits that time forgot to name,
inhaling the cool breath of giants.
I see them as a flash of twilight through
darkly barred shadows in fading light.
I hear them breathing just beyond
the screen of evening ferns.
I’m drawn over and over again
to this stand of trees.
Something ancient, benevolent
glides through the world here,
whispering stillness in the mossy light.
To stop, to breathe the quiet air,
to listen to the rusty call
of a distant raven—
these are gifts worth traveling for.
OUT TO THE END OF BEYOND
You have to want to go—
to find the little road that
climbs out of Ferndale—
a deceptively charming
country lane through mist
that settles in distant hills.
You have to want to see
the end of this continent
on our western coast—see
the Pacific driven by
Oriental winds. Hear
the roar of unstopped waves,
the sharp artillery-crack when
the glassy, cresting sea
collapses—the boom of breakers
hitting the rocky shore. Taste
the mist of salt water driven
on a relentless wind.
You will need to take
the Lighthouse Road, a gravel
track that runs through
stands of pole-thin ghost trees.
Keep moving if the ford
is full of water or ponding mud.
You will be the first
to breathe this air that has
come so far on a restless sea
—the first to see water
driven half-way across the globe.
You have to want to go.
And then you have to want
to return to the paved world
—to go back to your walls
and silent solitude, embracing
the memory of this last land
to treasure in your reverie.
POTENTIALS AND POSSIBILITIES
I no longer have faith in a nest of potentials:
those rounded mysteries that may burst
into something vibrant and alive.
There are no packages waiting for me under
some future tree; no tomorrow to unwrap.
Today, with all its shadowed corners
is all I am given. The dust of yesterday
clings to my windowsill, Time sleeps
in the doorway. Tomorrow, if it exists,
is playing with rollicking children
in the schoolyard across the street.
Possibilities? No, there are none today.
5 AM, pushing a wall of opaque light
up the twisting road, climbing
out of Fort Bragg. No other cars
intrude on my moving cell of light.
A startled doe freezes
by the side of the road, one leg lifted,
ready to cross to the greener side,
if you could see color this dark, this fog.
I have left my wallet somewhere north
and am desperate to find it.
I hope to be at the last place I used it
before they open the bistro.
In the dark, alone on the road,
I have a lot of time to think about my
habits, the people I can count on,
how hard it still is to ask for help.
I feel so incompetent—in the dark,
alone—mostly alone. No shoulder
to cry on. No two-heads-better-than. . . .
No hanky offered with compassion.
This is what I tell myself: if I can
come out on the other side of this
with my wallet and my life in hand,
I can stop looking, stop longing.
I can make it through the night,
appreciate the dawn, and gather the bricks
that once protected my younger heart—
start rebuilding that seamless wall again.
Today’s LittleNip:
BEFORE DAWN
under a paling sky
from the dark cypress
beyond my back fence
two owls calling
each to the other
until they join
in haunting harmony
—Katy Brown
___________________
Many thanks to Katy Brown for her seamless poems and photos! Katy is a frequent contributor of photos to the Kitchen, but it’s good to have her poems on the table, too!
Yesterday was the #GivingTuesday Fundraiser for California Poets in the Schools. I don’t know if they’re still accepting money, but check it out at www.facebook.com/donate/298325997682284/. At least you’ll be able to read more about this wonderful organization. See also www.californiapoets.org/.
—Medusa
“…the rusty call of a distant raven…”
Grandfather Raven
—Photo by Katy Brown
Celebrate poetry!
—Photo by Katy Brown
Celebrate poetry!
Photos in this column can be enlarged by
clicking on them once, then clicking on the x
in the top right corner to come back to Medusa.