Snow Geese in April (for Jane)

Finally, this aging poet has written a new poem.

Here it is,

Snow Geese in April (for Jane)


Snow geese

Like flying ribbons

Of confetti

Cross the sky

Then settle as silently

As snow

On muddy fields

Bursting with seed



Mount Baker

Rises above a crazy quilt

Of tulips

Like a porcelain plate

Propped against

A dark mantle of ridges



We have come late

To the garden

Full of girlish chatter

Belying our age

Speaking of journeys

And mountains to climb,

Whether the traveler

Crosses continents

Or ponders

The silent galaxy

Of spiders hatching

Under an eave


Karen Sykes (Waring)
Roozengaarde, April 16, 2010

Poem for HB

Poem for HB

Bad heart, bad legs, bad weather
Did not keep you off the mountain

You said no matter what mountain
You are on
You can always see the next one

A lifetime of mountains is not enough,
One more summit, one more handhold,
One more sunrise smeared across the windshield
On a slow winter morning,
Almost wrecking the car
Because you saw another mountain
You had not climbed

You fooled them, bushwhacked
Through
The wilderness of
Fading arteries,

To climb another mountain
Before the heart stutters,
The boots fray and the mind finally forgets that
Which you swore should never be forgotten:

One ancient stump with springboard notches,
One old snag leaning against
The cold silk of a winter sky

You stopped and wondered: what happened
To those loggers? Where did they go?

You know what happened to the loggers.
You know what happened to the trees.
And you know what will happen to us.

I look at the photograph
Of the first mountain you climbed
After surgery, your tracks in the snow
Heading to the summit like a grin and I ask:
Who will come after you?
Who will remember the loggers
That hauled their heavy gear up impossible mountains?
Who will remember the fresh green stink
Of fallen cedar and the hot white hands of booze?
Who will remember the smoky rooms
And the women who smelled like blackberries?

You know that the men who are afraid
To live, live anyway.
You will not
Wait for the lights in the mind
To go out, one by one

You will not drift down the
Slow river
Of nursing homes, clutching oxygen tubes and
Climbing to some awful summit.

When you fall, you will fall
With a piece of the mountain
Under your fingernails

So you might as well tussle
For one more kiss, or work out
A system for the lottery
You might as well
Walk out of the house
And climb into your car,

You might as well drive to the mountains
Get out of the car and leave the headlights on
And start walking,
You might as well take the trail the loggers
Took those cool blue mornings before
The sun came up,

You might as well reach out
And touch the fog and feel the sleek hours
Of the morning rubbing against you
Like a lover as you head toward some
Summit you have never seen.

Karen Sykes (Waring)

Horsetails

Horsetails

There is no way to kill them,
Devils guts, they are called

It is little consolation
That dinosaurs brushed by them
In ancient starlight

Nothing halts their advance;
Not even poison

At night I hear them
Breathing under the house
At dawn the spiders come
Sewing the weeds together
With dew

Yet I cannot help but envy
Their fierce determination to live
Even when not wanted,
Not like us
That can sicken from love

They will survive us all
After cities fall
And the sun has spoken

They will survive
In feeble light or
Shade,
Broken asphalt or
Beside silver streams

No use to say
This is not the garden I wanted:
That I wanted poppies to
Dance in the yard like gypsies
Or that I wanted to run to you
Like I did that cold day in the cold mountains
When you wrapped me in your wool
Shirt and said “forever”.

Karen Sykes-Waring

Ants

ANTS

After September I stopped killing the soft moths that fluttered silently through the house. They could have my sweaters, they could lay their eggs in my wool shirts, even the blue sweater John liked best. There were brown smears on the wall from moths I’d crushed on their way to the light that dazzled and drew them. I left the stains to remind myself that they had lived once like me, were hungry and fed at the light, seeking warmth.

This morning I find one dead in my cup, wings folded shut as if in prayer. I don’t know where they come from, these moths. At night as I read their soft shadows move across the sour yellow light of a dim lamp, a crooked lampshade, a pile of mail torn open and forgotten.

I remember stagnant August, a hot tent and ants. We’d camped near Timothy Meadows in the Chiwaukum Mountains under a sky heavy with rain to fall, the ponderosa pines scarcely breathing. The grass held still like grass in a painting. We pitched our tents in a hurry to beat the rain – we could smell it coming. It smelled like an old road, it felt like something was going to happen.

We finished as the first quarter-sized drops of rain fell, as the trees shuddered like dancers raising their arms. We ran to our tents and I discovered I’d pitched the tent on an ant hill. Hundreds of ants were going about their business on the orange fabric of the Eureka – big, fat black ants with red heads, following the unwritten code of their genetic memory, onward in a blind path that did not deviate for such a minor obstacle as a wedge of orange fabric in the grass but simply crossed over it in their stubborn faith they would find what they sought, what pulled them through the grass but I did not think of that as I crushed them, killing as many as I could until my hands were covered with their substance like a thick jam, until I was sickened at this mindless genocide and I stopped as violently as I started, gently brushed the rest of them into the grass and crawled inside the tent, wanting to weep for the sudden sharp grief that made my throat ache with unshed tears as I lie in the tent waiting for rain.

(From a creative writing class, early 1990s)

Careening

Stephan (A work in progress)

My whole life has been a rushing, a hurrying, a sort of careening. Friends stand by, astonished and perplexed. When I stop careening, it’s as if a bell had stopped clanging that had been ringing for a long time, the silence huge and strange.

Stephan once dreamed of me as a truck out of control without brakes on a downhill grade, careless, crashing into smaller vehicles on the way, damaging, hurting, blind, never looking back at the damage I caused.

It would seem I attach too much importance to my very existence; on the contrary I do not believe I am important at all, perhaps that is why I have floundered and flailed about the way I have done. I knew I was no one and that kind of knowledge is unbearable. I clawed at the eyes of the universe, I raged against obstacles of any kind, I begged other people to define me, to give me eyes and a name.

(Journals, early 1980s)

Stephan

Stephan (A work in progress)

Our favorite journey was to the mountains, to a place called Mount Pilchuck State Park, not far from a ghost town called Monte Cristo. We tried to get to Monte Cristo more than once but the road would either be closed or the weather forbidding.

Stephan died unexpectedly in a car wreck on the West Seattle bridge and when I finally got to Monte Cristo I was driven by someone else. Twice I went to Monte Cristo with other lovers and once with a woman friend, a grizzled philosopher of a woman named Jean who drove a yellow truck and looked for precious stones.

Each time I went to Monte Cristo I tried to find Stephan again, as if he’d be there waiting in the blue shadows of the foothills, waiting for me find him for he was always ahead of me, looking back over his shoulder, waiting for me to catch up.

Once I dreamed we were climbing a trail at twilight and that I couldn’t keep up; he had to stop and wait and this he did with infinite love and patience and that was the way we were in real life, Stephan way out ahead of me, knowing everything, me gasping, scrambling and falling over loose stones.

I’m still not sure where we were trying to get to – perhaps it wasn’t any place at all but I felt we were there when we flew kites or when we drank coffee from the old blue thermos in the mountains that day he pissed my name in the snow. Back in the city, back in the cars we backtracked, we forgot what we knew and fought and hurt each other well.

Now alone in this city Stephan’s kites fill my walls. I would be afraid to fly them now, I am afraid I would damage them. Only Stephan could repair them, know how to fix things when they were broken. Anything that can be broken can be repaired, he said once during the ravages of an argument. As we argued he quietly and efficiently repaired my broken key ring. When he handed me the key ring he handed it to me as if he were handing me peace but I couldn’t accept it. I wasn’t through destroying.

Stephan often gave me things I wasn’t ready for. He must have glimpsed a part of me that hadn’t yet emerged, that lay half-formed, undeveloped, blanketed by resentment and fear.

NOTE: This was written in the early 1980s after I had stopped drinking and found my way to the mountains.

Vesper Peak

Vesper Peak (revised September 7, 2009)

The trail to the mountains
Begins in the heart
Where wild paths tangle
And marriages
End

Birds we cannot see
Sing
In the shadows
Pikas run across
The rocks
Beneath a cedar
That has withstood a thousand storms

The trail gets worse each year
The crumbling bridge
Now missing planks,
Rotten around the edges

A slimy glaze of leaves
And darkness
Coats the first half mile
Weaves through
Trees and vegetation
That never see the sun

Each year
The footlog
Over the Stillaguamish
More treacherous
Than the year before

The route
Through the valley
Is cairned anew
Each year
You cannot see Headlee Pass
Until you work
Your way up the valley

Thus I was fooled by a liar’s path
Marked with a cairn
Off route
Leading to black slabs
And a lunatic path
That died in brush and ancient snow

But the mountains gave
Me back again
To meet others
On the trail

Let’s meet at the lake,
Someone says

Someone shouts below
The switchbacks
If I don’t get there
Go on without me

We climb together
And we break apart
But everyone gets there

Some of the climbers are fast
Climbing the golden slabs
Reading the alphabet of footholds
With their feet
Others are slower
But not defeated by bad knees
Or age

Though we take different
Paths we arrive
At the same place
To gather on the summit

Copper Lake
Lies like a legend below
A scrawl in the summer register
Says you were there
A year ago

We try to keep the summer
And hold it still
But it is September after all
And pikas are scurrying
Across the broken slopes
Of Sperry Peak

Does anyone see
Those fragile harebells
Clinging to the cliff

Does anyone see
The last stand of gentians
Against the fading light

But we must hurry now
To beat the dark
And cannot linger to
Taste the cold, sweet berries
Along the trail

We must follow the path
Past the dark mirror
Of the pond
That earlier clasped the sun
And cross the river
Once more
Armed against the night
With feeble flashlights
And corny jokes,
Tired but laughing
All the way back

Karen Sykes (Waring)