Laura Da'

Beauty Screen


The clear cut unrobes
in uncanny beauty. Emerald ferns
stretching along the ropey
brown earth of deer trails
laid bare like the part line
on a head gone rapidly bald.

Certain slivers of velum
in sacred texts, ruptured by the awl
of aging or the hand of the parchmenter
are stitched closed
with bottle green thread.
The scars meander

like bean plants
creeping up the page
in search of a strut
to grow against.
You see the shape of the land
more clearly for its austerity.

For these many years
I have held
a note at the end of my files—
Patient must mourn
the end of her old life
and accept present limitations.

Beseech a madrona tree
whipped bare, anemic,
and bilious skinned;
listing against
a logged sidling’s last fringe
about the banalities of the cuts,

while tying a rag of supplication
to the lowest peeling branch.
The beauty screen intercedes
in the valley of my hometown.
Which side is paradise
and where might

a person find just one
of its twelve gates?

Lacamas Canon


Erratics burnished
with striations
of glacial scour
kneel before flood crests.
Cluster gold alters
consecrated by gildings
of powdery hop mildew
ascend from levee moats.
The tracts where camas
was propagated,
weeded, and rebulbed
rest under the altered river.
Thus, it is taken
as fact by those
who shifted the deluge
that the tending
never occurred.

Cattail Net and Antler Velvet

Islands will become and islands
will settle into nets of salt.
An admiralty style anchor chips rust

onto a creosote road. A fleet of deer
run through tall grass and salmonberry swales.
Bark stripped from cedars in long lozenges of itch.

Cattail nets scraped velvet from antlers.
Trailing vines and ochre hair narrow across strings
of cedar fiber rope. Fragments of brick in the depth

of the shamble shore hint
at a scabbing over; cribbage boards
made from walrus tusk. The dogfish whose livers

greased lumber for one hundred
years gather in small schools
near a tombolo’s lacy bridal trail

of shattered shells and driftwood.
It is sinking. A pitted carnelian agate lolls
over in the tide. Islands will become islands again.

Also by Laura Da’: "Cross Stitch Primer"

 

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, and Instruments of the True Measure, Washington State Book Award winner. Da’ is Eastern Shawnee. She lives near Renton, Washington with her family.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2022