The Primitive Streak

And in the beginning there is a tiny living dot encircled by amniotic arms sent down a tube packed with food for the journey. A dot smaller than a comma the result of chromosome trading a white patch of life a whole new composition.

Then the shape-shifting begins: a row of nodules form the vertical line that is the foundation for all shapes; this first line drawn on the viscous canvas, this primitive streak, begins by curling into itself; a heart starts as a tube, swelling to its enormous task; appendages muster at the margins while the head gradually globalizes accentuated by two swellings that will become eyes; and at last the caudal stump that marks the boundary between being and not being.

after great pain, a formal feeling comes —Emily Dickinson

In the quiet after disappointment fog settles over high peaks you wanted to see, salal and Oregon grape shine with their new rain, calm. Even the creek seems a distant thing down in its canyon.

Cleansing after anger, that the trail twisted into a maze, the weather worsened, you were too slow.

What follows fright, the gaping door of the old mine staring when you took the wrong spur.

At your age, the self no longer sobs until it’s spent. A facsimile.

You stop to gather salal berries, chew for the juice.

Hemlock and silver fir unwind the trail down. Silently, it seems. Without rancor, they release the oxygen you need.

The quiet that follows disappointment won’t rise again to talk.

You recognize what is— reading the leaves you know to unpuzzle the many greens. Too late in the season for blooms. Count the red berries— kinnikinic, rose hips, twisted stalk.

Match your steps to the earth underneath them, savor the fog-rain until you partner the hush outside.

Steve Dieffenbacher

In Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, a cliff-side plowman is ignorant of the fatal splash, ships nestled in a bay edged with towering rocks. while here, leafless trees and quiet livestock quell all foreboding, a trailer with broken windows on one side, the field’s twin towers ordinary quivers of due decay as an airliner passes above a pale and distant building, perhaps a mill or dimming freak of light that might or might not be a target.

Nothing stops the dread of something about to happen— not the jet’s stilled, diagonal plunge, not the ragged foreground of early autumn or passive, grazing sheep and cows staring at the cameraman beside me. To the right in the pasture, beyond a fence, even the unfinished building, symbol of careful industry, is held in stasis under the plane whose bullet-shaped engines angle bluntly at the horizon to shatter the scene.

First there were those who no longer have names. Later, when they crossed the ocean, they found wealth buried in the land, and pretty soon after that, the wealth buried them. Time gathered on the rim of old glasses, once full. All that remained was in their hands. They tuned pianos, raised children, begged.

When I was born, I took the hands of my father and called them my own. I took the mouth of my mother and spoke. Like a map, I harbored the trails of generations; worn, weathered and carefully crafted to fit snug inside your wrinkled palm. I folded up tight as you walked the path, slouched in the folds and crevices of your skin, took in your scent, absorbed the trickles of sweat as the road turned rough.

You turn to me years later, looking for the way home. I turn to you; all that way back to you; unfolded. You point to my heart. I nod, searching then for that old place, that old nothing but

Forgiveness still hanging on to Time running away.

Kelly Lenox

The evening’s just cooling off when sudden sirens howl down the highway— someone’s Fourth of July eclipsed.

Slowly—crow by whitewater by wren— forest sounds return. Fir twigs jigsaw the sky as clouds cast a net to catch tonight’s buck moon.

Sparklers flicker by the Santiam River. Fountains brighten faces beside the cottage. Firecrackers echo upstream, and in the city marchers against police violence light bottle rockets, point lasers into eyes of cops who shoot rubber bullets, throw chemical grenades. With fire we claim our piebald freedoms.

Two months from now, fierce winds will snap poles whose sizzling wires ignite drought-crisped limbs. In moments, fire incinerates this swing, these trees, their birds. This town. Even a fire truck burns.

A hundred miles away, suburban air will coarsen, orange-brown. Sear eyes, lungs with the vapors of this cabin’s vinyl cushions, fiberglass shower, foam bed.

Tonight, clouds pushed aside, the moon rolls past the usual stars sprayed across the sky like stalled fireworks, and we sleep.

Janis Lull