The Mountain
Each morning of my stay I walk down to the lake,
carrying my empty bowl. A line of beached canoes
lies tipped on the cut grass, hulls gray
as the low sky. No one ever seems
to take them out. The lake rests undisturbed,
flatly reflecting the mountains
that rise from its far shore, their steep flanks
half-sheared of Douglas fir, slashed by logging roads
that veer improbably straight up. I hardly look
at the mountains. I’m in the brambles,
reaching for blackberries so large you might
mistake them for plums, and by some miracle
even in this sun-less September, enough replenished
each morning to fill my bowl. For three days the air
is acrid with smoke held down by cloud.
Then overnight the wind changes, and the sky
lifts like a blue wing above new distance.
There, behind and above the slopes
I thought mountains, the real mountain
rises, as if fulfilling a promise I didn’t know
had been made. The lake turns white
with its reflection. It is like the evening hour
when the day-long drone of trucks and chainsaws
finally halts and a massive silence swings open.
The next morning, a blue haze, the mountain
gone again. But now I feel how the whole landscape
shifts toward the submerged weight of it,
as the heart tilts toward a prayer too heavy
to put into words. Toward a hope not even named
as prayer. The common hope of a whole people, that large.
Floodplain
All morning in mid-labor
not ready for the hospital
walking the floodplain
the earth still soft
waters receded
tulip poplars
knotted sycamores
clumps of grass
ghosted with silt
the trees leaned downstream
from many floods
I clung to them
my sisters I thought if I thought at all
somehow the term did not seem wrong
the ground was washed bare
fibrous roots exposed
slack water
dusty with pollen
we walked and rested and walked again
bowing
then kneeling
to each contraction as it came
some bright bit of blue
caught on the far bank
without panic
I felt each crest carry me farther
away from you
away from familiar ground
in the spaces between
your hands
lightly—
the air on my face—
perhaps I was the trees
their massive trunks shifting
as wind poured
through high branches
perhaps I was the riverbed
or the light as it pulsed between moving leaves
from all about us
a wordless insistence
deep in my interior
the forest the water rising
Tundra Swans at the Great Marsh
At any moment half the swans are airborne,
birds loping awkwardly into heavy flight
only to veer back for another splashdown,
wakes unzipping the sky’s half-frozen image.
Over everything floats the constant, urgent
clamor of their multitudinous calling,
layered voices airy with an arctic
emptiness brought to this protected edge
of a landscape rivered by highways, its parking lots
glittering like open water from the air.
Another winter at the refuge, though
projections show their winter territory
leaping north within ten years. There’s no
permanence. Just this cacophonous splendor,
the children too now running in circles, flapping
and shouting, birds wheeling and landing and rising,
the winter marsh all wind and current and wing.
Emily Tuszynska lives in Virginia, just outside Washington D.C., where she often explores the suburban stream valleys and pockets of forest with her three children. Her poetry can be found in many journals, recently including Prairie Schooner, Ligeia, The Georgia Review, Indiana Review, and Poetry Northwest.
Header photo 12019, courtesy Pixabay.
