Green Linden Press

Winter Solstice, Cormorants Roosting

How sleek they are, folding and unfolding
the great scimitars of their wings,
waiting out the bleak December cold
on the spindly balconies of a willow,
its limbs splayed like black lightning
above the pond. It must be well past midnight,
the traffic on Aurora Avenue only occasional.

I can just make out the faint rustle
of redwings in the cattails, the plash
of ducks near the shore a pebble-throw
from the park’s one bench, the pond stippled
with red ribbons from the nearby Arco sign.
How, hanging in space, do they stay upright
on those twigs the size of pencils?

They resemble urns made of obsidian,
balanced, never toppling, even in wind.
The blue of dawn filters through a row
of alders on the pond’s far shore. I recognize
the wheeze of the E-Line bus, making its first run.
They must be chilled on their delicate thrones
on this longest night of the year.

They strike me as pilgrims on a mission
of unknown purpose, weary but dutiful sojourners
hoping to grab a few hours of shut-eye
before a day of diving. I count 79 dark beacons
in the willow. I never believed in angels
until this night. They sleep among stars.
They have long curved necks and hooked beaks.

Wild Irises

You were heavy then with our first child.
Those March mornings, before you rose,
I’d go out in the chill of predawn.
I’d step over a strand of barbed wire
from a broken fence rail, hike toward
Takashi’s barn, the weeds frost-glazed,
the barn’s roof half collapsed.
I’d sit on the lip of a claw-foot bathtub
meant to water, I supposed, Takashi’s horses
before the full force of the Depression
wiped out their produce farm. After Pearl Harbor,
so I heard, Takashi, his folks, sisters, wife,
and their four kids, were herded
into the concentration camp in Puyallup.

I’d wait for sunup, there on Takashi’s tub,
for a field of wild irises to turn blue.
I’d wait for the tops of three great cottonwoods,
just leafing out, to catch the sun’s fire.
The irises would rise, shimmer,
ruffled into a haze of smoke, lake-like.
I’d imagine how I would describe them
to you—A lake of smoke, I’d say,
riffled by sunlight, Takashi’s field
flooded by flowers, me in the tub.

You’d have set a fire in the cook-stove,
ground the coffee to the snap
of pine chunks ablaze in the grate.
We had a cable coil table then,
its knotty pine top sanded and oiled.
We’d talk of the birth, excited, not a little
befuddled by having created a new being.
How can we have been that young?
I still see Takashi’s fallen barn,
the early spears of camas before
their flowering, the sunlit irises
pale as the sky at that hour.
There’s the bathtub. There’s me
sitting on it, shivering at sunup,
the iron claw legs long gone to rust.
There’s you in a chair near the heat
of the stove, your bathrobe open,
your breasts large, your round belly
aglow, sweat-sheened, ready for its labor
in those last brittle days of winter.

We lived in a two-room rental then,
past the clapboard church, its cross toppled,
belfry empty, on the end of a gravel road.
Now, in July heat, no sign of the broken
fence rail, no barbed wire marking Takashi’s
pasture, not one gray board from the barn.
In its place, a convenience store and gas pump.
Out back, the weeds are hip high where, before
our time, his horses would step from the barn
into the sunlight to graze on blue flowers,
to drink from the clawfoot tub I’ve spent
an hour searching for and cannot find.

Edward Harkness is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Saying the Necessary, Beautiful Passing Lives, and most recently, The Law of the Unforeseen (2018, Pleasure Boat Studio). His poems have appeared widely in print and online journals, most recently in, Valparasio Review, Sisyphus Review, Triggerfish Critical Review, and Bracken Magazine. His chapbook, Ice Children, was published by Split Lip Press in 2014. He lives in Shoreline, Washington.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2021