Poetry
To Speak This
Becca Hall
To speak twilight, gibbous, blown rain.
To speak the perennial calligraphy
of madrone and gentian, the orbital advance
of rock frog, freckle pelt, tickertape bone.
Thimbleberry and rowan reddening in the undergrowth,
scatter of caddisfly larvae, a riot of fish in deep pools—
slender rush, spreading rush, sickle-leaved,
Drummonds, many-flowered wood-rush,
a multitude of rushes, a preponderance
and wood ducks, muskrats, their ripples lapping—
if this I could give you in words, I would
and blue borage for courage, an ointment
of sanicle, smoothed in, a green sanity,
a making whole. Grown all through the thickets,
this herb, and in openings, in woods and shores
all my life unknown and now I am gone from it.
Still when I find it, you may have it too, and the gray scrape
of granite, wet rot, green spleenwort in the apple-crook,
fen moss, maidenhair, orange crumbled punk
in the hollow stumped cedar, hidden yew,
fog over the fields and ravens calling, my want of it all.
The mountains between us I don’t mind,
just the long plains and rivers
winding their wounds through rocks
farther than I care to go. And how the wind
whips in, haughty and unstoppable,
the sun dropping hour by hour.