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Clearcut
You said we would find blackberries.
I think you just wanted to show me
your forty acres—the possibilities
of our first summer together. Dusk caught us
in the tangle of salal, berries, and devil’s club.
Less than a quarter mile from the road,
we were lost, no paths, the firs and maples
huge, rustling, the undergrowth indecipherable.
We never knew how we found our way out,
out from a night in the woods exposed—
mosquito-bitten, scratched, itchy with sweat.
You cursed yourself for getting lost with no compass.
I followed, just scared.
“Shall we walk up to the logging show?”
you asked last week, knowing I couldn’t refuse you—
that land we struggled through
laid easy, the swampy places open for anyone
to steer clear of, what seemed a hill
we’d had to skirt, just a simple rise and over;
the trees, stripped, stacked in the mud
at the road’s edge, cash.
I’ll never be able to see what you see—
an investment paying up before you die.
I’m talking about more than trees—a forest gone,
a piece of risk, a mystery.
I’m too squeamish to walk back on that revealed land
to the line of tall trees,
exposed to sun now, waiting.
I, who, as you pointed out, want the good life,
want our daughter to have advantages.
A man and a woman can love each other
so much, it would be impossible
to unravel what they have together,
the threads not just woven,
but matted, a person would have to cut or burn
them apart and nothing would be left.
Yet the days—jobs, meals, hours
of laundry, relatives’ visits, our child
crying in the night. We’re seldom together,
so tired, each irritation flares to argument—
and we have to cut down a forest to live.
We, the ones holding our hands to the cool
rough bark of trees, throwing our heads back
to see sun in the branches.
I go on night after night holding you,
holding on as we clamber through one more patch
of salal and stinging nettles. Isn’t this
how we came out on that clearcut,
stars visible, nothing to stop
their pattern against me—
smooth but not easy?
Previously published in Clearwater and Not As You Once Imagined, Trask House Books, 1993.
Return to Volume 1.5
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