Güd wrtr

Because you asked me to post
this photo of the two of us
all mortarboard-ed up like so many
of the students we nurtured
to graduations,

many of whom didn’t think
they’d make it—some of whom
we didn’t think would make it—

I’m reminded of your 19-year-old
grin, one of my first community
college journalism students who
set the standard for so many
to come.

Eager and talented,
great-hearted, hard working
and funny, you were someone
whose progress I wanted to follow,
and who, for reasons I’ve never
quite understood but so
appreciate,

has wanted to hang out
with me all these years—
watching you flourish
as a teacher, loving that same
grin as you talk with such
joy about your students,
past and present,

as I still talk about mine.

•••

(for Neil Reilly, with love and thanks for nearly 40 years of friendship)

(for Dad’s birthday… and Mom, too)

Having no idea if you’re even you anymore,
gone these 21 years, it occurs to me that
if there is still something of you, the him,

there might still be something of she, the her.
And perhaps, upon her more recent
departure from her former form,

she drifted into your neck of the… well,
maybe not woods, but it could be the lake,
since you came together best on

the turquoise boat on cobalt blue water,
both daughters life-jacketed, ready for you
to tow each of them on a single ski,

before each of you took a turn. And as
those daughters remember you on what
would have been your 95th earthly birthday,

we hold out hopeful hearts that you two brilliant
points of light might be orbiting each other like
electrons circling atoms—in this case, us.

We imagine you two having a strong affinity
for one another in your present state, bygones
you carried while in your earth suits begone,

you, the him,
she, the her,
bound by the electrostatic force

better known as love.

I wanted to know,
whoever I was, I was
alive
for a little while.

—Mary Oliver
excerpt from “Dogfish,” from Dream Work © 1986, Penguin

•••

One way to know you’re alive
is to use the body you were given—

though you had no say over its original
shape or hair color or internal affairs—

to keep it mobile in the world
for as long as possible. You know

that while the body is a garage
for the soul, these days it also

houses a vintage car, and it’s good
to take her out for a spin,

open ’er up, see what she’s still
got under the hood.

A tune-up’s not a bad idea,
but mostly you want to move

that chassis, feel the engine
thrumming, though, sure, she’s not

as peppy as she used to be.
But listen, there’s still a lot of life

in the old girl—she’s not done yet.
Keep ’er going, honey,

for a little while, or maybe longer.

For a week now, I have risen
as the sky begins to pinken,
to gently pull aside the windowshade
and see the collective of thirteen

soaring pines downslope
standing at attention over
the Hood Canal. I look at
the half-finished upper deck

that Al is building beneath
the Council of Trees, just above
his Sub Deck, where I love to sit
and look at the trees and water

and sky, along with the occasional
submarine silently subbing its way
up the canal—ocean-bound, tower
exposed, accompanied by smaller

boats wielding wicked firepower
for protection, if necessary. Later,
sitting on the Sub Deck, I look up
and count the council members—

yes, thirteen, an excellent number.
In the event of a tie vote, one of
the council could break it, until I
remember that trees, even ones

of different species, are forever
linked underground, their rooty
fingers holding tight to each other
in a perennial pinky swear.

Which means, I suppose, that
there are no ties. That everything
between them is unanimous,
that they come to agreement

without weapons or argument
as a single body—without words,
angry or otherwise—which seems
something of a miracle,

an excellent way to operate between
conscious, caring souls, everyone
looking out for—imagine it—
everyone else.

•••

(for Al and Terri Wolf with love and thanks
for their week of hospitality in Port Ludlow, Washington)

Which seems like a lot—
the most I’ve ever had
in this lifetime—

but not nearly as many
as the longtime lodgers
perched on this hillside,

long-trunked and densely
branched evergreens that
have logged perhaps

two or three times my
number of years. No way
to know until these

great pines fall or someone
fells them, which I hope
no one does. That they,

like me, are allowed
to stand until we can’t,
that we can bask

in the view before us,
delight in it, grateful
for this time in the sun,

inhaling and exhaling
elemental molecules,
ones that we will return

to earth and air someday
when we are done
with these bodies.

But not yet,
the trees and I say.
Not yet.

When you’re a guest in someone’s
home, and they retire before you do,

and you, downstairs in the guest
room, realize that it’s dark

upstairs, and it’s midnight
and you’ve got a yen for a snack,

you decide that you’re fine—
you don’t want to wake them.

But the next day you go to
the fruit bowl in the kitchen

and fetch an especially
friendly looking peach

and bring it downstairs
with a couple of paper towels,

thinking that you’ll eat it some
late night over the bathroom sink,

letting the juice dribble down
your chin without a care

for the stickiness. Don’t wait
too long, a voice nudges

in your head. Eat that peach
while the eatin’ is good.

Don’t forego pleasure for
potential hunger later.

Take a big bite. And another.
Let that sweetness fuel your smile.

Where it has been doing its
California imitation for months,
pretending that this green place, too,
is the land of little rain.

Where the unirrigated roadside
has gone golden, like much
of my home state.

Where the climate flip-flops
like a just-landed salmon,
the migrating ones heading
upstream that bears snag
like candy out of rivers
from here to Alaska.

Where I awoke, looking
out the window to a gray veil
swaddling the canal in—can
that be?—actual rain.

All morning I watched
the curtain slowly rise to
the arrowed tops of the pines,
then higher.

Where the gray lightened into
a question of sun, though,
of course, it was up there,
making its daily arc across
the sky, the one we humans
think of as ours,

as if we’re the fixed ones
being revolved around,
as if we have the answers.

(between Kingston and Edmonds, Washington)

Today you walk on
while, underneath you,
the four- and two-wheeled ones

drive onto the thrumming deck,
but you and your friends head
up the long, elevated corridor

where dozens of passengers make
their way to long bench seats
or small tables, or to the galley

for decent coffee because this is
the Pacific Northwest, after all,
where the bad stuff is forbidden.

You take a seat with your friends
who, though recent transplants, seem
rooted here like venerable pines,

who are taking you to cruise
the abundant farmers’ market
across the water, followed

by breakfast and another ride back.
But for now you’re impersonating
a cog in one of 21 ferries that

chug across the Puget Sound
46 times a day, 322 trips a week,
through innumerable gray

mornings like this one. Like
the Harley riders on the deck
below, and the young parents

with little kids cavorting on deck,
you settle in, reflecting on the depth
and narrowness of this navigable

inlet of ocean, this estuary fed
by freshwater rivers and streams,
the creatures that make their homes

in and on and high above the water.
You, like other visitors from landlocked
locales. You who have been granted

this moment to rise from your seat,
step outside into the brisk breath
of the sea and inhale thirstily,

filling your grateful, jubilant lungs.

•••

(for Terri and Al Wolf, with my thanks for their hospitality)

The tree is saying things, in words before words.
It says: Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering.
It says: A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.
It says: There are more ways to branch than any cedar pencil will ever find.
It says: Listen. There’s something you need to hear.

—from Richard Powers’ “The Overstory” © 2018, W.W. Norton & Company,
winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

•••

Trees, connected underground
by vast webs like rooted corpuscles,
move information through their

slender, entangled threads,
Earth’s natural microfibers, feeding
each other, communicating.

Listen, they wordlessly telegraph
to those listening. There’s something
you need to hear.

They want to remind us of our
common source, humans and trees,
like oaks whose roots entwine

below ground, loving arms giving
and receiving in equal measure.
When a tree knows it’s about to die,

it disperses its essence, its energy
through its mycelia—fungal cells
interacting with root cells, feeding

the soil, silently decomposing plant
material, turning it into carbon
dioxide—to share with other trees.

The tree is saying things, in words before words.

It is saying, Take what I have,
this sun, this water, eternal questions
that you above-grounders hold, too,

for we are the same being, reinventing
ourself again and again, starting over.
We learn; we remember; we share.

The tree recites an ode:
We absorb your presence;
after each footfall crosses our surface,

we leap up in a merry dance,
our micro-movements ingesting
what you leave behind.

The tree’s soundtrack echoes,
the voice of a thriving collective:
We are one. Remember.

We are one.

(for the crew of Southwest flight 3361,
Sacramento to Seattle, July 24, 2025)

We rise in this soaring silver bird,
aiming upupup, to a height humans
cannot achieve unless encased
in such a magnificent beast.

And I think of the early years of air
travel, when attendants were young
nurses, Julie told me, she who flew
for American in 1940, employed to
serve drinks, offer a pillow and care
for those woozy from flying so high.

All of 10,000 feet in those days,
she said, maybe 14, cabins
not yet pressurized, all souls aboard
feeling the weight of their lungs
struggling for air, cruising at altitudes
higher than terrestrial bodies
were designed for.

Still, in these times of even higher flight
that make it easier on passengers
and crew, the gyroscope in my brain
always tilts on takeoff, liquid sloshing
from hemisphere to hemisphere,
until the trap door at the top of my skull
opens, and I rise,

I rise with the lift of weightless
feathers burnished bronze,
as I imagine I will one day
when I no longer need this body
and these great silver wings
to fly.