Picking Mushrooms With Papa In Woodinville
In the moment, it was what you do.
Looking back, it must’ve been strange for him
to have been a woodsman by trade,
with all the customary garb,
transplanted into a near-suburban area.
Suspenders could hold him there,
a hickory shirt, neon pink flagging.
Trees have a way of taking you in.
You cannot walk into a house
not long yours and expect welcome.
Not necessarily. Trees, though,
are not new; they have no conditions,
and the timing—any sooner, and
we’d have found nothing at all,
only leaves, dirt, devil’s club, but
just so, being welcomed: moss,
goldenlode bounty, bucketsful, Folger’s
coffee canisters full, with two holes
drilled for white, plasticine rope.
So, you walk with these at the right
time into trees, with his hands outstretched,
and you bend low, at the right time,
having walked everywhere but a path
because trees do not differentiate,
and then, at the house, you spread them
on the counter and the family examines them,
ogles this inventory, as if to say:
how did they multiply in such number,
such size, who is capable of such
multiplication, but it’s simply
a profession or ministry, God’s work,
no nomenclature he would call it,
not even going into the woods, only:
here now on the counter, morels,
some chanterelles. Tolkien wrote:
“In Rivendell there was memory
of ancient things; in Lórien the ancient things
still lived on in the waking world.”
So, here are busy streets, a gas station
even, a certain closeness. And up there:
endless passage, walking without
question. Robert Service may have
put it better were I to look, or better
no author at all. This has already been
too much. Having to put it all down.
A bucket, but perhaps a multiplication
never expected.
Fire Extinguisher
The wheels of the four-foot-tall cart
holding the red fire extinguisher in the sun
on the tarmac to the regional jet are not
new wheels. They imprint on the mind
like an old, rotund stamp, or zoetrope images
in a circular device of a man with a mustache
on a tall bicycle with one big wheel in the front,
one small one in the back, and no other wheels
where there shouldn’t be. Stationary, I imagine
them spinning yet beneath the height of
the rolled out jet bridge ramp and the workers,
out of sight somewhere having brought them
there this morning just like the day before.
Seeing their compact roundness beneath
the hard paint of the requisite instrument
is to know they work, where a tradesman sits
beside securely in the margins of your mind,
in the Steinbeck shade where they yet have
a function inseparable from a history, where
we use them and haven’t replaced them
with digital counterparts, or outsourced safety
to a plausibility test that must be housed in
an app and downloaded with corporate approval
before consideration. Where we passed
with our carry-ons, before pushing the cart out,
the man’s arm must’ve bent and compressed,
reached down to tilt the load, and we would
soon be blinking mid-aisle, the next slide
clicked into place, while wind caught his hair
and light passed through his image, protection
before it was deemed a directive, not
mitigated by bandwidth, that rolled into place
a certain heaviness, our burdens, all ease
of motions before we made them.
Maybe I’ll Catch a Second Wind
Maybe I’ll catch a second wind. At most,
a gentle stream of sand will come down from
glassy slopes and buckle the backs of my legs.
It’s hard to remember what was under
them once your feet are in the air, without
fear of your head knocking a stone, without
movement, caught in the suspension of an
inertia not yours. I was always glad
that moments like this would come around. There’s
a lot of certainty in what we don’t
know will happen, because then when it does,
happen, that is, then that’s that, in midst of
itself, the mist emanates without you,
the fine grind of God’s how-did-it-get-there
you’ve no answer for, fresh spice of future
forgetfulness on the ground next to you,
on the breeze with what comes later. Maybe
fate’s caravel will take me away, carve
the seas of uncertainties toward calmer
shores, my feet seen seeping into what has
waited for them, bounding up in spite of
there being no premise, the way sand will
become firm from the call to support they
call gravity. Sometimes, the only way
forward is to be borne, not to decide.
See the seagull ascending so high and
fast with the clam in its beak it knows it
will drop soon, and follow it down in a
fractious dive, the requisite plunge. See there
in the rocks, in the inches of deep green
that has diminished in recent times, say
look what I have found without knowledge of
having brought it there. A sundered shell against
barnacles, kelp, hope longer than stilled ships.
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(Photo: Clayton Sieg/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
- Maybe I’ll Catch a Second Wind and Other Poems by Luke Janicki - November 21, 2024