Happy Birthday America, You Old Song
On that day, a Washington sky was fireworks without the boom.
Light smoke from forest fire crowned Seattle just
as the Independence Day sun sunk behind the Olympics and
orange boom! Awash.
Later, we found the origins of saddle on the high ridges of the Cascades,
threw one foot on either side of the gravel path, kicked our spurs into the mountain.
A boom!
The movement that America is.
And later a washout
and later a fire lookout
and later a dormant (a former boom) Mt. Baker sits,
once egging on the fire with its deep memory
of heat and release; flow and scream.
On eruption: singing in a National Park.
America the Beautiful (prompted),
phantom lines from Francis (ramparts and boom!) and
This Land is Your Land’s endless skyway.
The ‘your’ in the latter doing a lot of work.
Inheritance, oppression, unworthy,
One rogue thunder clap (a boom!) splits our song,
then the bird song
and, again, valley-wide silence.
The tree’s word for thunder is sustaining
the tree’s word for thunder is threatening
the tree’s word for mushroom is life and again
our word for mushroom is food
our word for mushroom is death cap.
Awash in vista, we see the ashen scar of last year’s Chilliwack River fire, a boom.
If a fire burns the forest and no one hears it does it make
If a fire…
On the highway, a ‘don’t tread on me flag’ flies flung from the haunches of an F-150.
Wind rippling it just so, the snake has its own tail in its mouth.
A modern-day America.
A lot to swallow.
Ourselves to swallow.
A swallow.
Maybe this is merely a petition
to turn truck beds into raised beds.
Maybe this is merely a boom
in the lineage of thunder,
in wonder of fire,
entangling all in these spacious skies.
Special delivery!
Coming in on a Sunday because D and I were, as stated in this poem, out in the mountains this week (a few more pics below). I wanted to get it out while the week was still fresh in my mind. A lot is rolling around in my brain here, most of it in the poem, but…
This is primarily inspired by a friend’s recommendation to try encapsulating Walt Whitman’s tone in the “Bursting” section of the collection I’m working on. Their prompt was secondarily augmented by reading an essay this morning by poet Jane Hirschfield about “Modern American Poetry” which featured a great deal of rumination on Walt.
I’m also reading Ghost Music by An Yu right now, a compelling novel that prominently features mushrooms and song.
Also listening to a book called Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Save the World.
Here’s an older Into Wind poem also about America.
Thanks for reading. Pardon any typos!
