Mount St. Helens
Blind Spot
Never mended my blind spot—thought the volcano swerved
A graphic novel monster, stationary molten rock
At Windy Ridge, Mount St. Helens, 30 years post-eruption
Cartoon-like, cracked.
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Cell phone powers up approaching the ridge—four bars.
A series of beeps in your pocket
Imagine those hikers falling from a snow cornice
Thinking they stood on solid rock, not packed snow
Posing for a photo, they slid down the south face
Blurred in winter’s majestic light, flashes of old growth forest
Charred in pyroclastic flow
No more solid than the peak that once glistened distant
On blue Portland days
What you can’t fathom finds you
Objects unto obliteration.
Volcanic/Panic
Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life,
and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
                                                                                                – Daniel 12:2
1.
Poets and scientists struggle
to explain, to grasp
volcanology—a pyroclastic flow
is rapid
turbulent
hot gas undulating
escaping fragments
ash
rock
lahar mudflow
liquid fires flying
domes collapsing upon themselves
We cannot stay away
2.
“Private property”
cannot appease public needs
the towers fell in fragments
scattered
beneath the rubble
spirits smoldering
3.
Large tephra chunks of
Lapilli (Italian, for the ash
of Vesuvius)
Species return, some new to the
Cascade plain where forest had thrived
We live with embers
What about a simple memorial?
A national monument for all who pray or cry
Volcanic insides expose hot air
Who speaks?
Light hits the pit where rubble lingers
I hear something.
Photo by Simmons B. Buntin.
