Forced Landing

With a line from Barry Lopez

When sparks light fires in the cylinders’ stumpy tangle you feel it in your pants. You push the throttles up. Take off roll, noise and power, and the yoke vibrates like a humming bird in your hand. You bless the oil pumps juicing the main bearings that everything turns on.

Bernoulli’s Principle is working as it should. Here comes lift off and gear coming up. Over the bay, sunny April day. Air, earth, water, and fire behaving. We might be guillemots building speed to climb a cliff. We might be angels beating hard for home and the sweet here-after.

My copilot, call him Jim, damn it, because I can’t recall his name. He might be Frank or Joe, never Joyce, never Lloyd. Jim, let’s say, is flying, I’m on the gauges, the ones that say, “Damn, Kid, you’re lucky, or not.”

The right engine--call it typhoid—quit. Heart attack or busted aorta. The oil pump fails, and the shaft welds its bearing. Everything out there stops dead. The propeller’s three flat boards won’t feather, won’t streamline to the wind. Drag and weight force us down.

We skim the bay, slow in a whoosh. The wash of fear, the cockpit filling with the North Pacific. Fast unbuckle, we don’t feel the cold. No hatch doors, we kick and kick windows like horses in a burning barn. No luck. Standing on the gauges, heads under water, we reach up into air in the cabin exit, worthless air for the rapture of hands to die for.

A hard push of the legs and clawing through the bulkhead over boxes of freight, I am somehow out the back door and swimming up the blue-green gloom. And then there is air, air everywhere. Trees bending in a breeze over on shore, boats coming, and time is singing Bach, a skinny violin climbing woodwinds and brass.

Forgive me, Jim, I can’t recall--not Joyce, never Lloyd—you were slow then still and breech beneath the big blue world. Forgive me Jim, for not pulling you along. But thank me Jim, it turns out I was born without thought, words, or will to reach a hand down like a forceps and pull you up, birthing your big blue bundle.

A man and a boy in a boat fish you out, flop you in over the gunnel like a loose limbed squid. I can’t recall their names either, not Frank or Joe, Melvin maybe, maybe Curt. Air from nameless lungs blows color back into your face, dazed but bright and looking right at forever. Your name, sorry, I don’t recall.

But I remember trees, birches bending in wind on shore. And I remember Dale Thorsbakken’s field of hay by the creek that day I skipped school. My head in the clouds, mind full of deep water, I was young and light on my feet. And I remember before we could talk we knew how to sing. I shrugged it off, and all day I swam the creek then left for home to figure out forever later.

Thomas Mitchell

The Silencing Properties of Rain

Herodotus said that rain was an afterthought of late summer’s imagination, that every raindrop represents a potential sea of creativity.

I don’t know any words soft as rain falling on the beach as today’s heron lifts her wings, flutters across the jetty, gradually disappearing in the mist. I don’t know any words soft as rain falling on the trees while massive rocks simply glow in the afterlight. The rain silences, absolves all that is wrong in the universe, softens the comings and goings, the war, the pestilence, brother against brother, the pain of childbirth, in preservation, like a woman lifting her arms.

Where Rock Moves

The land is a being who remembers everything.

—Joy Harjo

Born of a craggy place, scaling Camel’s Hump and Mt. Mansfield, I thought my footing firm. I climbed trail-scars, skirting cliffs and larger-than-life boulders, my pack filled with the ancestors’ blessings and sins. I learned to go around, not through. Earth steady, rock solid.

Frozen still, despite thawed ice, these Green Mountains carry my contrived story like a lingering scent, pungent, musty, humid. Roots anchor in stony soil barely inches deep. Weighted by oppressive hills, breathing labored, I struggle to break free.

In the Alaska Range, sentient presence lives— exhaling through fault lines, Denali stretching higher with each seismic shift. Land pulses with the hoofbeat of roaming bison and ancient mammoth. Ground quivers. Steadied by old souls, a miniscule part of their knowing awakens inside me— a temporal pause, contained within crystals of ice fog and spirals of the sun’s highest circuit. At the thin edge of the earth’s crust, redressing wounds, I move through toward center. Choruses of blessings rise, scuttle through tundra, following the way of water, braiding over the flats.

Anne G Murphy

Like Bones

I used to toss rocks from garden beds; now I leave some to collect water beads, to hold moss, plumped under a rhubarb. To keep roots alert with choices, downward threads probe the perfect anchoring pebble, uncoil deeper to manure’s fetid lure. Refuge from robins for tunneling worms slowly breaking clods, but not as slow as stones leach mineral elixir, like bones, with the assumption of lifetimes ahead. For the pause they require, leaning on my favoured spade, nostrils flared by fresh cut paths through nodding grasses rooted in soil born of glacier’s crush and grindstone wash.