after Emily Carr’s “Logger’s Cull”
The sky enters through the eye,
sleepy or concealed or otherwise
looking down—not God
but Sky: wind, cloud, rich prism
of color, of blue & blue & blue—
clouds move like waves, sometimes,
see? A few trees left reaching—
the weak, the rotted, not straight or thick
or worth enough. Devastation
on scale without any measure
beyond the human footprint:
beheaded stumps left open necked—
the brown ground like a wound,
an old one, traceable,
like tongue on teeth. The wind
itself finds its way through—
one tree left open
like a ribcage, a revelation.
The Sky, sleepy with us, too old
to be sad, the way it feels now,
to me, not like exhaustion, but
like knowing,
like holding still,
when otherwise you might
be screaming, crying out.
