From the mountains which were hot
and buzzing with wildflowers
we looked
out at the mussel-shell-blue
Strait of
Juan de Fuca,

its islands and bays
plucked from the Pacific.
All the same,
both currents ran wild and deep.

Far below us, toy freighters,
a tug yarding logs, spooled
out their wakes, each line
soon bent to a fine

meander by the wind. Even the harp-shaped
Dungeness Spit lost and found
its bearings, while seals hauled out

just beyond the lighthouse,
sleeping
pell-mell on top of each other.
Scarlet-billed oystercatchers probed
the tideflats, whistling.

At the toe of the mountains our
house, hidden by evergreens like a
patch of summer moss, busied itself
with chickadees,

fieldgrass bedded by deer
bringing back their fawns,
the
neighbors’ loaded cherry trees
inviting us to plenty.

We still carry our children’s
photos, dog-eared, up these cliffs
and out to the blazing beaches
they played on years ago.


Every summer the Swainson’s thrush
still hides itself in the darkest woods to sing
while wind loosens madrona leaves,
yellow butterflies.

When sun’s heat
drives us
to the shade of an alpine flr,
we share it with trillions
of newly-hatched wings

buzzing in and out, catching
the
light, the world inventive as ever.
How is it that this year’s profusion of
avalanche lilies
pushed through snow,

or that, wedged between
lichen-roughed rocks, violets
unfurled their heart-shaped leaves to the sun?
After six months underground,

a chipmunk busies itself
nipping off grass seeds, bending
limber
stalks. I, too, feel newly-invented
by the season, no longer lost

in a house empty of children.
Both sons grown, I’m sprung
free of the daily to sit with a
flock
of small flowers and draw them,

or step from here to the
glassy shallows of Dungeness
Bay, feel
its cold ache in my
ankles,
follow the sand
shifting and settling

like waves those years we
paddled
picnicking with our
youngsters.
I was fooled then
as I am now
by the white
blaze of clam shells

strewn along the shore, and
how they’d fly up, blindingly
as
the seagulls they’d always
been,
hovering overhead, swiveling

to watch us with sharp golden eyes.
Even at 4,000 feet, like a monk in saffron robes,
a checkerspot suns on a craggy rock,
its summer intense and brief.

Where the meadow falls away,
a
swallowtail skids eratic before catching
a down-draft flipping it
over the edge,
Houdini of
surprises.

- Charlotte Gould Warren