Sara Burant
The Mckenzie River passes underground then into Tamolitch Pool
Our mallet-feet
beat the trail
the ground staring
back unflinching
a little yellow
in birdlike register
flutters there
among a willow’s
green my eyes
are flowering too
pollen entering
childhood running ahead
laughing
then the pool
is oh-
so-roundly
before us continuously
born earthly
earthen blue
the river having
hammered
through lava’s
rough tubes
thin passageways
which must take
the rushing headlong water
by surprise
the way death did
my mother
alone in her one
small room
her mouth caught
open like a fish’s
O trying to send
the summoner
with his laden hook
away In the beginning
not only the Word
but what came
before it, oh from that
O to emerge
Emerita analoga
In the swash zone the buried
mole crab’s stalked eyes
stalk the unrest. As receding
waves thin to glass the crab’s
featherlike antennal flagella
sift for lunch,
writing V’s on the surface
like a child inscribing
a window’s condensation, V for very
vanishing, vouchsafe
and veteran, as in
the crab is a veteran of churn, of the
churning that makes up this world
& against which, by liquefaction, the crab
digs itself in, untucking
the fragile telson
it applies as a spade, furiously,
time-lapse in real-time,
the way Yosemite Sam digs for gold.
The mole crab’s treasure is a closet of sand
into which it fits, just, an eye
in a socket, a lid over an eye. You & I
look up & out: gulls, pelicans,
a lone fishing boat—& if we imagine
endless, it’s because light is falling
over the water not like a lid but
a garment we sometimes feel, or
want to feel, our true selves clothed in.
Emerita or emeritus of flux, the mole crab
wears a drab chitinous shield
& of its five pereiopods only one
is chelate & slender,
used to clean gills clogged with wrack,
the flotsam, molecules & polymers
that penetrate its tight burrow & make
breathing uneasy.
At Meadowlark Prairie
This remnant of native prairie looks
east, orange sunrise, blue foothills
& the high peaks i can see on good
air days, Three Sisters that remain
themselves, though glaciers tatter,
a volcano simmers in the middle one’s
gut & when fire feasts on their
forested cloaks we can’t find the sky
in our throats, can’t find enough
words for loss. Without thinking,
i threw a favorite wool sweater
in the dryer. It was golden with a hood
my cloak of feathers, it shrank
past knowing what to do. Can we lose
what we didn’t know we had? Did
we ever love the way the meadowlark does?
i hear him out in the tall quaking grass,
a season’s last camas flaring violet-blue.
The checker mallows, pink quivers.
Oh i’d like to see his “brash display
flight,” a fast yellow blur. i’d like
to shake out my feathers, collect
this & that, weave a fitting nest
Broken pale moon snail shell
From this partial evidence
we might reconstruct the spiral sense of it
first imagining the soft
infant body
secreting proteins
that built a framework
attracting
calcium crystals, a defensive
structure, a barricade
around the body
Euspira pallida coil
or twist, pale & true
you uncoiled
from within your shell
a purple foot to cover your prey
& drill-like deployed
your radula to bore
a perfectly circular hole into the prey’s
own shell, an hours-long
operation, your acidic
excretions dissolving
the prey’s malleable body so like your own
but lest we forget
when threatened you withdrew
sealed behind the operculum
little lid closing
the eye of you in, pressed
against the nacre’d shell-wall
that still curves, staircase with no stairs
ascending to
or descending from
the umbilicus, an
enclosure, dark as
time is, before us or after