New Leaves, Balm or Black Cottonwood (Populus trichocarpa)

As two learn to walk

together as one,

one of their most primal of fears

is that might somehow be separated,

perhaps irreversibly.

That is why Love seeks to protect

every step Freedom makes.

POPLAR OF FORGIVENESS

for Midge

A poplar tree offers me shade,
moving from ridge to valley,
I rest a while.

It's the sound, the sound
of the wind moving in the leaves,
a sound wholly absent at the more austere altitudes,
that washes away like the water of a Lourdes
all the hurts and pains of the past.

How we long to go back, go back and set straight
our mistakes of the past, to say
that it wasn't like that, or that
we didn't intend things to turn out
the way that they did.

But the sound carries these thoughts
away to somewhere else I know not where.
I open my eyes. A leaf, already yellow, falls.
A chickadee flutters by.

I must live a better life.

Cottonwood Place,
Eagle Cap Wilderness,
Oregon, VIII.4.2008

Please visit my picture-poems.com MOUNTAIN WATER
print gallery. Above is a set recent images.
(Mouseover controls.)

I might just mention here, following the ethical principle,
First, do no harm, I never use cars or snowmachines. I
do everything on foot, bike or ski. I think this in a
deep and direct way affects my work, and how I see
the world. So all the photos above were approached
on foot, including all the in between spaces, sometimes
involving journeys of weeks or months.

I would not want to work any other way.