One of the other sites we were asked to visit was a clear cut,
and I really got into the idea of sampling.
You walk around in this forest, it's
full of all this geeky, science stuff.
Plastic buckets and instruments and measurements,
and it's not pretty.
And you get the wonderful feeling
of the messiness of doing science and trying to take
measurements and samples.
And so I'm sort of parodying the idea of collecting
specimens in this one.
Specimens Collected at the Clear Cut.
"One.
Wild currant twig flowering with cluster of rosy microgoblets.
Two.
Wild iris, its landing platforms purple,
bleeding to white, then yellow in the honey hollows.
Purple veins showing the direction to the sweet spot.
Three.
Dogwood.
Not what I know from the Northeast woods,
the white, four-petalled blossom marked with four rusty holes
that make its shape a mnemonic for Christ
hanging on the cross.
This one, six-petalled, larger, wider,
domed seed house in the center, no holes on the edges.
Shameless heathen of the Northwest Forest
that flaunts its status as exhibitionist for today.
Four.
Empty tortilla chip bag.
Five.
Empty Rolling Rock can, empty Mountain Dew bottle,
empty shotgun shell, beer bottle busted by shotgun shell,
blasted bullseye hanging on alder sapling.
Six.
One large bruise, four inches below right knee,
inflicted by old growth stump of Western red cedar.
Ascent attempted though the relic
was taller and wider than me, debris field skirting a meter
high at its base, wet and punky.
Nonetheless, I made my try, eyes on a block of sodden wood,
reddened by rain, fragrant as a cedar closet.
Here in the open air, the block of my interest
wormed through, pecked through with tunnels diameter
of a pencil.
How many decades, how many centuries
of damage and invasion the tree had survived, but the stump
felled me.
Left me with its stake on my claim,
and jubilation to see that nothing of this ruin was mine.
Mine only the lesson that the forest has one rule--
start over, making use of what remains.
Seven.
Old hunk of dead Douglas fir, gray as driftwood,
length of my forearm, width of my hand.
Woodgrain deformed into swirls, eddies, backflows, and cresting
waves--
a measure of time, disturbances that
interrupted linear growth to make it liquid as stream flow.
Nine.
Four metaphors for the forest.
Plantation trees: herringbone tweed.
Old growth trees: medieval brocade.
Clear cut: the broken loom.
Clear cut five years later: patches
on the torn knees of jeans.
Ten.
Skat.
Pellets the size of Atomic Fireballs,
hot candy I loved as a child.
This, more oval, less round, not red but brown.
Specimen dropped by Roosevelt elk savoring the clear cut's
menu of mixed baby greens.
One pellet broken open to reveal golden particles, light
that traveled from sun to grass, to gut, to ground, to mind.
Forest time makes everything round, everything broken,
a story of the whole.
There's your--