Detasseling

Erasure is a trick.
Surely, the hours have always shifted.
Each tassel of the corn
is a ladder to the kernel —

silken umbilical cords
in the southern breeze.
Glass corn blows across the acres
to sweet yellow tassels in a hot wind.

Swales of salmonberry
and arabesques of sword fern
push against balustrades of rain
and naked gray clouds,

trailing their fat feet.
Golden eagles in the watershed:
a metaphor for improbability
so far north or perhaps a heraldry

of the warming skies.
Kokanee salmon run contrary
to the named moon.
Seedy russet sweetness of thimbleberries

a month too early.
Fledgling crows peel peas
from shoots in their hunger.
Lay a skillet under the bed

to call a girl child to your garden,
a sickle for your boy.
Northern Spy apple trees
grow crooked and gray

from cores lobbed near trestles
over the Snoqualmie River.
The hands that flung them from windows
dodged felled cedar.

Each path an enigmatic mosaic
verged by coal.
Gardens of mermaids
and graylings and mares.

Cawing birds of knowledge and recollection.
Hustling down an abandoned logging road
into a slough — a heron vectors cloudbank.
Heat dome blisters

shingles of orange drought
across the green needles of cedars.
Dentalium on the coast
boil in their own shells.

ξ

Strata

My own folks
rode two horses
up a valley road
beside the Snoqualmie River;
syncline arches buried
under the layers
of second growth cedar.
Crunching sword ferns under hoof,
bridle deep in grasses
on a warm Sunday afternoon,
they tied the horses to cedars
and decided to settle
there on the mountain side. Before
all that, sometime between
Shawnee Reservation
and Hanford Nuclear Reservation,
my grandfather would
ride mares over Satus Creek
into the farm where he worked
training Quarter Horses,
bred them when the owner was gone
and pocketed the stud fees.
Horse Heaven Hills —
across the buckskin anticline waves
of the Wallula Gap,
whole valleys carpeted
with sorrel yearlings grew
into prize cutting horses,
becoming a kind of family legacy.
I have a family story
that after the allotment act,
one of my distant great uncles,
refusing to sign
in the place of a missing father,
age twelve, was beaten so hard
he ran off in the gloaming,
bleeding a dark saddle pad
across the withers
of the fastest horse in the barn.
In court papers, the horse,
a leggy sorrel,
was considered adequate compensation
for the last of the land
in its entirety.

ξ

A poet and a public-school teacher, Laura Da’ studied creative writing at the University of Washington and the Institute of American Indian Arts A lifetime resident of the Pacific Northwest, Da’ is the recipient of fellowships from the Native Arts and Culture Foundation, Richard Hugo House, and the Jack Straw Writers Program and has been a writer in residence for Richard Hugo House and is the current Poet Laureate for the City of Redmond. She is the author of Tributaries, winner of the American Book Award, and Instruments of the True Measure, winner of the Washington State Book Award. Da’ is Eastern Shawnee. She lives near Renton with her husband and son.