Kyuquot Sound

At Farewell Bend the road begins to climb
Through sage-clad hills above the windy Snake
Where ponderosas crown the round-topped Blues.
We’ve driven that same road each time we take
The trip away from roads to rocky shores
To where the massive cedars, yew and fir,

Salal about their feet, grow at the road’s end.
For five remembered summers as a child
We lived between the forest and the tide,
We dug for clams and fished and picked the wild
Red huckleberries from the mossy log.
But now above Kyuquot Sound the hills 

Are stripped of logs from highest ridge to beach.
Among the massive stumps the seedlings fill
Not nurseries, but an orphanage so vast
It stretches from the tropics to the poles.
The salmon and the whale spirits turn their backs,
And mountain lions turn, at bay, to kill.

After Surgery, January 94

In rose catalogs, hardy
Means the plant is likely to survive the winter
In a gentler climate
Than mine;
In those places roses need pruning
In summer to cut out diseased
Wood and in winter to remove excess growth
So next season’s flowers will be bigger,
Or long-stemmed like these
Half-dozen sent to me the day
I came home,
Classic buds, six different colors
(only the yellow one fragrant).  None
Could have grown here in my garden where
Winter prunes the roses
Or kills them, and in spring I kneel
Next each plant, searching
For branches spared, still inhabited
By some green waking spirit, and I cut away
Only what is proven dead.

I had a tooth pulled when I was six.
As the nurse clamped the ether mask over my face,
She said it would smell like roses.
Someone laughed, in that time long past, when
I woke and asked when the tooth would come out.
Still now at forty, what I dreaded most was
That measureless dark.
The night before, I lay
Awake to savor the way the minutes
Pass one after the other, whole and holy
On the breath of God.

Naked and shivering under the thin gown,
I was wheeled into surgery.
When I asked, the doctor told me
People under anesthesia don’t shiver.
The night after,
After that time of neither time
Nor light
Again I feel no wish to sleep, only
To lie in the partial darkness
Rocking in the river of time
Washed in oxygen and nitrogen
And listen to the minutes pattering by just perceptibly;
In the refrigerator, six buds open slowly.
I wonder if the rose bushes, naked
But not shivering under their skiff of snow, know
Even now the world is tilting back toward spring
While my body remembers
To breathe
And remembers to breathe
And remembers again to breathe.

(Wordsworth had daffodils)

My neighbor sprays
her dandelions every spring.
I’m sure she casts
an exasperated eye my way
(upwind)
each June when the yellow blooms
dot my lawn,
turn to fairy fluff
and take wing.
I remember walking to high school
through Newman’s cow pasture in late spring
when anything
is possible, and the long green field
glowed with golden dandelions and yellow
breasted meadowlarks singing
from the weathered fenceposts.

-  Ellen Nicholson Walker