Issue 1: Don Colburn

Bridge of the Gods

                                    Cascade Locks, Oregon

Centuries they dreamed of walking across.

Then one side of Table Mountain calved

and slid into the gorge, rubble enough

to hold the river back, an inland sea.

Wind and rain scraped at the rockpile dam,

but the Great Spirit kept it whole

for his people to carry dreams across.

Snow-all-year mountains stood watch

until a quarrel over a beautiful woman

made them crazy and they hurled hot stones.

The ground shook and the bridge of the gods

buckled – rapids in the river.

Centuries more the legend grew

and gave its name to this: a steel truss

cantilever span whose gods make do

with girders, rivets, triangles of stress

to counterbalance north and south

upstream from the hydro dam.

A dollar lets you drive across, no time

for looking down, no room to walk.

--Don Colburn                     

Part of Speech

                                    Long Beach, Washington

Not knowing leads me to the water’s edge, a beach

long as a marathon, miles of the same

flat sand, white-tufted sea, the wind a part of speech.

A gravel road, a path, then footprints reach

the grassy dunes – golden – but I came

to go out past them to the edge, the beach.

A ragged bunch once hunkered in Clark’s “dismal nitch”

a few miles south, but nothing here recalls that name.

Just sunlit sand and sea, and wind a part of speech.

The end of distance has to curve and stretch,

the wrinkled sea a painting with no frame.

I walk past knowing to the edge, this beach.

Sandpipers hunt and peck for something, each

a Charlie Chaplin, jitter-quick, their antic game

between the sand and tide, the wind a part of speech.

And yet it’s not a game, their constant search

for sustenance. Nor mine, whose earthbound aim

looks out beyond the edge of knowing and the beach,

to sky and sea, where wind’s a part of speech.

--Don Colburn




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