LAURA DA’
THE UBIQUITOUS GARDEN
When the last pangs of winter press
famine foods into the tongue like a bit,
the Skagit grants the interior Salish Sea
a kingly portion of its water. Dragonflies
at the corners of my view drip acid color
as I am put to a series of questions—spring
begins when your stride crosses at least seven
daisies in the meadow. I hear the childhood
birdsong we used to mimic in the strawberry fields
so it must be the cross-quarter day between
the equinoxes. What sort of sweetness
will you bring when you arrive and will you
be carrying a bright torch? Skunk cabbage
sentinels coat the swamps—old men in sunshine
shawls with spiney war clubs in the air. The slender
leathery intertarsal joints of the small birds rustle
near my shoulders; the digging pole leaves
its lasting shadow across my palms.
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*** ** ***
THE HUNGRY SIBLINGS
Osprey near Deception Pass are so regal
fish go belly up just to be taken in such talons.
The wind dies down and the clams make belly buttons
in the sand. Sea pitted agates and crumbs from hasty
meals meld under the feet of children in bright swimsuits
who balance on a nurse log. Up the estuary to the flat green
ribbon of sweet water, a Falcon definitively plunges
into tall grass of riverine pasture then makes a flapping assent
unburdened by a catch. Three siblings throng in
with mountain berries on their fingertips. We are so hungry.
So hungry with nothing to eat but these berries and the sugar
in our pocket seams from yesterday’s candy. I feed them until
deep orange smoked salmon oil dyes their fingertips
and they wrinkle their noses at the thick draft
of sweetened iced coffee but drink anyway. The youngest
pronounces it marvelous. I take estuary salt
when I bite down on my tongue and hear pebble rake
in my ears. Osprey are heading south now.
Chinook nestle in the bull kelp just under the waves.
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*** ** ***
BECOMING THE MONARCH OF THE TALKING FIELDS
We walk the small town whose staircases join
main street and first, passing the churches and trading posts
and the pioneer hut reeking of creosote to buy soap and
sorghum and coffee. Across the neck between Similk
and Padilla Bays, land accordions itself across outcroppings
of basalt veined in quartz—a vertical record of time
made horizontal in great haste. A ponytail of bull kelp
fans out in the teal water of the channel. Potato blossoms
broadcast across the funneled fields squint like the summer eyes
of children. Once when an older boy yanked me to the ground
by my braid my mother came running and hollered at him
until he trembled. She’s reaching now for the word butterfly,
gesturing, saying these pieces of yellow, do you see them?
On Fidalgo Island an Osprey lands on the snag above
a steep cove choked with kelp and seagulls and peers
at pilot whales slimly navigating the deep elbow of water
between the mainland and Guemes Island. There are so many
delicate passages of swift and narrow water that the Salish
name for this exquisite navigation comes up again and again; delicate
and fraught as a thread through the needle’s open eye or a thought
shuttling through a neural pathway. The rocks hold
a deep scoured groove in the form of a massive rope burn
from the cordilleran ice sheet’s frigid retreat.
We are strolling over open bedrock, Orange Sulphur
moth in the clover, Dreamy Duskywing in the willow.
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*** ** ***
ON SANDBARS
A man is cleaning fish on the fish table monument.
Iridescent scales and gossamer webs of pink clinging
to translucent bone. In the background is the Columbia
and Cape Disappointment’s cedar stacks. To the north
is a town whose name may roughly translate to the phrase
hungry for trees in reference to the tide’s eroding bite.
Harbor seals bobbing at the river mouth dive under
the trunks of sea cast lumber as they tooth for fish.
They look like old friends recognizing one another across
the marketplace, waving fins and nodding. Perspective
can get lost in the granular view. Something innocuous
sometimes pushes an incisor into me too. Popping the trunk
to grab something to clean up a spilled coffee, my eyes hook
on the rolls of paper towels and Clorox wipes and I find myself
snagged, remembering chemo, surgery, radiation,
the first kidney biopsy from eight years ago that was mopped up
and held in the weave of the cleaning supplies just like the ones
under my fingers. The smell of the estuary is the same
mix of blood and iodine under the clean cover of ozone.
Anyhow, I clean it all up, hold my binoculars to my eyes
and peer back at the water, then get back in the car, drive
the precipitous climb of the Astoria-Megler bridge
right over the mouth of the Columbia where it meets
the Pacific; the most dangerous crossing in the world
by most accounts. Orange ribs of shipwreck still punctuate
the beaches. Floats of centuries old beeswax fumble
onto shore. The highest paid ship captains are navigators
of this stretch. The sandbar under the water is miles long
and perpetually shifting. Standing waves can tip even
the sturdiest vessel. The cost is that high.
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*** ** ***
CAPE GOOD HEALTH
The same ghost towns that sketch themselves in sepia
retain living fields too color drenched to behold straight on—
meadows inundated with hues yanked from beneath the waves.
Backyards are studded with gilled trees and birds shrieking
in salted tones. I pass a knoll of the river near Sedro Woolley
and remember swimming with my mother—she was ebullient
with her feet flashing pale soled and her arms freckled like the spray
of sesame seeds on a sandwich roll. A Great Blue Heron flapped
onto a rocky bar and walked over the water to me. Certain unions
of ocean and river make the kinds of broad estuaries that can’t help
but leave wakes of flooded towns: Avon, Skagit City, Ridgeway.
Baptisms intomb and name in the same wet flux. There is not much
of my mother in my face or arms, save the proficient crawl stroke
she taught me to cut through currents and a gaze of saturated competence
across the bridge of our noses and eyes when we look to the far shore.
At Cap Sante, where the water moves definitively from sweet to salt,
there is a city buried, but the madronas no longer look like battered bodies,
rather they take on the silhouettes of mothers and children at the summer seaside.
Bronzed, gently peeling and drooping graceful limbs into sheltered coves.
In my shoulders I can feel the memory of dipping a baby into the water
and in my toes I can feel the memory of being dipped.
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*** ** ***
SPINSTER MENDS THE TALKING FIELDS
Holding a licked thread to the needle eye,
I create the essential form of stability.
I’m about to turn left onto Chuckanut
Drive where my mom would always tell me
about her high school boyfriends at Fidalgo Beach
or Anacortes near Cap Sante, all pestering
for her hand in marriage. On the river’s
banks are surveyors’ transits and photographers’
tripods—in the water stand classic Salish
fishing weirs. What part of the story went underground
and what truth was buried in the shroud of symbols?
It might have been better to hold the needle than wear
the ring. Linguistically, Skagit may indicate
a hidden quality or abbreviated exclamation of surprise.
When the rich wedge of this estuary was drained,
draft horses had to be unhitched to turn, so thick
were the fir trees in that sliver of time before
they were hewn. And the lunar floods necessitated
carrying feed to the island-stranded cows by canoe,
tenders wading arm deep in the brackish water.
Who can say why the mind stops being able
to tell the potato shoots from the cow parsley?
I card and lift the wool, measure the dye, become
the mordant until the weave oxidizes as it must.
I mend the field, compressing scabs of earth with my toe.
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LAURA DA’
Laura Da’ is a poet and teacher who studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is the author of Tributaries, American Book Award winner, Instruments of the True Measure, Washington State Book Award winner, and Severalty, forthcoming in 2025. Da’ is Eastern Shawnee, and she lives in Washington with her family.
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A Dozen Nothing 