Twice, on my way to Upper Queets Valley - -
a dead end with a ranger station
(in season) as far as the map detailed - -
I had to stop the car to drag
fallen branches from the gravel road,
though I recalled no great winds of late.
I didn’t expect much company
when I arrived that slate gray day,
fair for February, from what
the towering conifers left
of the sky. Sound too seemed to recede
into baffles and spongey earth.
With no one close to consult,
I walked down one trail, but it soon
submerged beneath a flowing sheet
of clear water, clover-green vines
thriving below the surface, although
I couldn’t make out the type.
So I turned another way, drawn
from chamber to chamber
as if in a cave or maze,
imagining tales my kids
might have made from moss-draped
monsters and ghostly elk. Now dampness
blurred the boundaries between
the states of matter, growth and decay;
fungi grew in crescents at the edges
of vernal pools; windfallen
trunks trellised and nourished
hosts of their successors.
Mark writes poetry and nonfiction, and is a regular nonfiction contributor to the online Montreal Review (https://www.themontrealreview.com/). He practices law in Boston and lives with his wife, the poet Marjorie Thomsen, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is grateful be participating for the first time in the Parks and Points Poetry Series.
Banner image courtesy Mark Jensen .
