lantern reflections
red shadows on green water
two orange carp kiss
Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside
lantern reflections
red shadows on green water
two orange carp kiss
Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside
Far, far out
on a winding road
comes a woman walking
with a heavy load
With a heavy heart
and a heavy tread
she walks the road
where it has led
She’s all alone
but she’s not afraid
she walks in sun
and rests in shade
The road breathes dust
and crawls through mud
underneath her feet
and through her blood
And you think she suffers
‘til she hits her stride
and then you see
that the road’s inside.
The air is so still. The river runs so fast
that friction heats the surface, shears off layers of mist
that float and billow in the windless air.
They may rise, drift, dissipate;
they may settle, coalesce, form a fogbank.
I stand with my heels on concrete, my toes on grass.
My stillness is in friction with passing time.
Johnson Creek’s outflow goes against the river’s current:
the zone where they meet is studded with whirlpools.
Nothing here tells me what direction to go,
nor how to reduce friction,
nor how to navigate turbulence—
just a song of small thunder from the Kellogg outfall
and river buoys ringing against the gathering dusk.
Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside
I. September, 1982
Flying cross-country with United
I look out the window and learn so much.
I see the square fields of the Midwest
give way to the circles of the Great Plains,
see the violent upthrust of the Rockies
still roiling the air into in-flight turbulence.
I see the cloudless inter-mountain
painted every shade of late-summer dust.
The pilot’s bored, I guess. He entertains
himself and me with travelogue:
and on the right-hand side, folks, you can see
the mighty Columbia, Queen of the Western Rivers
if you look out now you can see Mt. St. Helens
with the flat top from the eruption
and here comes Mt. Hood on the left, we’ll be
making our final descent into Portland shortly
II. March, 2019
Since then I’ve learned new (old) names:
Ooligan, Wy’east, Lawetlat’la.
Shapes: the serpentine of riverbeds before
the trapping out of beavers, the dams and drainage.
Colors: subtle desert tones of sage, rabbitbrush,
mountain mahogany. Every shade of pink
that rhododendrons teach. I’ve learned
what cannot be seen from the air—
The feel of home.
Books Available
Dervish Lions
The Day of My First Driving Lesson
Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare's Stable
High-Voltage Lines
Knocking from Inside
First Monday 10-11pm, KBOO FM
Wider Window Poetry: bringing you voices you may not have heard from places you may not have been.
Tiel Ansari hosts readings and conversations with local and regional poets, and also reads poetry by writers from elsewhere in time and space.