Edge Effect: Trails and Portrayals

Path Through a Few Things that Must Be Said for Putah Creek, at the Foot of Monticello Dam

Path Through a Few Things that Must BeSaid for Putah Creek, at the Foot of Monticello Dam Before we know we are spun, between the dam's spilled staircase and dismaying face (aVenetian blind holding back an ocean) and a violence waiting for our trust to turn its way, we track down the old yellow canyon of pipevine swallowtails, pitch essence and effusions of anise, and watch pines escalade out from the flowing pathway: The creek is governed. ViolaceousBrodiaea kicked high here, last month. Now, fennel feathers low open places, bluegreen etherous plumes surrounding last year's silvery, or stannic, ghosts of cellulose like baskets of antique pens saved for the half sentence of ink left in each. Buckeye's maybe-toxic clusters foam, votive stadiums moot to bees. Saw-toothed toyon blooms, bees and variations all over it. It fills in the gaunt rut£4 Putah Creek, at the Foot of Monticello Dam of the canyon. Honeybees, toe-fat, tapshoe-shape, test the waters and taste. They need to recover the wet composition of their bodies— and species-memory: Like the dry overland flight of a bee across Saint Helens' devastation, miles between shrubs, hours between dew, how low it flew over ashes without landings. These bees go to the slaking ground in its lapped, liquid, fast honey state. As they lift away from human impressions in the sand, late morning light in the shallows outlines a water strider's shadow— the way a longhaired cat nimbuses, searching a dirt road at dusk, or a buck's backlit antlervelvet glows as he lowers, foraging on a lupine hummock in the foredune. Two skippers contact and separate— six coal ovals (as after theatricallack of sleep, under eyes), twelve, then six and six— to the faint chaos of a sequence of brief bell-like water-sounds, 55 T W O : T R A I L S like one-line piano compositions by DonaldJustice (or one-line poems in an inch-high issue of Dragonfly, i 972). The water is the churned green of my birthfather's last cup of morphine as I saw it two days later through his door. And the current is cold below its sunburnttop-water. If over this slow-sided, fast-centeredcreek flying insects graph a transparent map, faster still a swallow's life consists in devouring thebackroads, the dashed ones, off that map one route at a time. Orbit consuming byway. Flight-paths almost become visible: pointed-winged parabolas like a hook full of thin yearsof belts falling to the closet floor. The swallows move on; the tangle stays in the eyes. And aswe come out of the canyon, flow away and on, S6 somehow in this time, in minutes we lost, someone has abandoned a stolen Mazda and ripped parts from it, not closed the doors or trunk, has undone the tires, left the car unadorned, Quaker, its idling trembles gone. They pass into me. I am antique with fear, recoiling from but mulling branched lines of the fractured windshield, headlights and reflectors, their light beaten out of them, crumpled. The scene is not stranger than the way one visionary schizophrenic ruins a holy city painting with jealousravings or beloved Jeffers jolts every sublime seascape with rage. I don't know what will take the car's carcass over, my terrified incomprehension over; J7 Putah Creek, at the Foot of Monticello Dam T W O : T R A I L S I don't know how we end up feeling better from worse when the mechanism's gone but we leave, cross the bridge (and its county line sign) above the suspended pueblo of the cliff swallows, the gates of their adobe abodes made of creek-water, grit, and mud of dust from which fennel fledges herb-winged and pine ascends, nourished. Dominion—death has it, beauty has it, water has it, drought has it. Within the cells of peace war is jailedor escapes, violent withthieves. And, their barium chloride fireworks backs dazzling us even in memory, the violet-green swallows fly up, up to take over the woodpecker holes. S8 ...