A child asked me, “What is the grass?” fetching it to me with full hands… (Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself, 6”)
Fever took me by surprise. I was eight years old. I lay in my room, under a blanket covered with pictures of pink roses, and the room began to whirl. I could not understand it, found it curiouser and curiouser. The ceiling tilted and dropped. The centrifugal force created, somehow, by my own body felt as though it would fling me out of it, as though I had become a spinning galaxy of heat and light and pictures and roses that made a body unneeded. I was puzzled but not alarmed. I was on fire with fire that did not consume.
My mother brought in the glass thermometer, held in under my tongue, kept bringing in trays with ginger ale and aspirin, water, sugary puddings after the sun rose. When the sun fell, my fever broke. I was still here but changed. I could hear the pink Queen Elizabeth roses growing on the other side of the wall, hear the pellucid slugs chewing the light green grass, even the music of starlight streaming through the willow tree I once fell from, when the wind was knocked out of me. Where did it go? I wanted to know. I felt then that whole universe unfurled from my home. Soon after that fever I wrote my first poem.
Cannon Beach, Oregon, January 1999 (Photo: Leslie Schultz)
Ecola for our daughter, on the other coast
Where is the entry point into this poem? The trail head is closed for the foreseeable which seems not that far, now, our human future shrouded in fog.
Fog remains at home, here, on this point where land meets sea, where a crescent of beach curves. Just north, Tillamook lighthouse still battens to its rock, abandoned columbarium;
just south, Haystack Rock looms picturesque, mute. I recall our last visit, four months pregnant with you. We rented a damp cabin at Cannon Beach, dim and stinking of old smoke.
That night, the roar of the surf called us out. We walked into the heavy fog, lights of heaven concealed, even the lights of the town, rocks, docks, Sitka spruce all shrouded.
Delicate as deer, we went, step by step, onto the wet sand, its shining all we could see except each other. The tide was low but we knew it would turn, that morning would come. That fog would burn.
Leslie Schultz
Minnesota North Shore, July 2017 (Photo: Leslie Schultz)Ecola State Park, Oregon from Lookout Point (Photo: Hellmann, courtesy of Pixabay)
They are no dream. They are a dream come true. These twigs, so red against the April snow, nestle with pussy willows soft and grey. These two embody harmony on a day enflamed by public fear and private woe. Their gentle forms uplift and bring to view
the memory of a friend who came to dine just last month, who knocked when twilight fell, who carried in these wands of wood and willow cradled in her arm, tied up in yellow paper, newsprint, yellow ribbon. I could tell they came from her garden, at a time when mine
was frozen, mud-brown, glyph of brittle grief. I exclaimed, then set them in a square vase, four-sided, like the creamy bracts that frame each cluster of tiny golden blooms, too tame, I think, to call a flower. In any case, that night, the slender red was not in leaf
but formed a backdrop for the silver show of fuzzy nubbins shaped like kitten paws. Today—Ta-da!—a dazzle of bright green crowns every dogwood twig like a young queen— Persephone, perhaps, who scorns applause, yet yearly melts my heart, as well as snow.
Leslie Schultz
Today’s poem sprang from a recent gift, as you see. My friend, Judy, also keeps sled dogs, which had not occurred to me until just now, making the gift of dogwood all the more appropriate. Looking at these images, I am glad that the vase was made by a local artist, the late Charles Halling. I plan to plant these magic wands–pussy willow and dogwood–in my own garden when the time is right, after last night’s snow is no longer even a memory.
Early morning. Dew gathers on each bentwood chair, on round tabletops near the swept sidewalk. Insects are beginning to saw minute music.
Their tunes buzz in early urban air, not yet drowned by the metal whines of traffic. A striped awning over a glass door. Coffee offerings in chalk
lean on slates near the entrance, work their magic, entrance us in, as if by chance, and we talk after silence not so companionable. Not that we bare
our souls, nothing like that. Maybe we just wake up a little more to each other, to who and what we are, exhale our nocturnal worrying, refuse miasma and mild panic.
We perk up at the scents of cold milk and rich, dark brew. We’ll come back for lunch. Maybe the stew? For now, Salut!
