Tag: Cascades

Three Lake Poems of Lassen

~ mtngriff ~ Leave a comment

1

Calm sky
Endless forest
Early autumn quiet
Crackers, cheese and fruit
for lunch

Water low now
Its muddy bottom polished
In stillness
Cirrus pulling tendril threads
Over blue sky
Webs to catch our thoughts
As they rise idly
Into air

Summit Lake

2

Climbing down
To water
Guarded by block-barked Silver Pine
Narrow, droopy-topped Hemlock
Shadow-painted depths

That stuttering ‘kreek, kreek’
High in the sky

Sandhill cranes
Flying back north
across the dividing range
Unfurling clouds
Pausing to gape at their
Drifting, insistent
Flight

Shadow Lake

3

Autumn-yellow
Spirea
Edging the shallow
Muddy, green-yellow surface

Spears and crescents
Of refracted light
Haloing the cliffs
As one looks across
Towards lowering
Sun

Cliff Lake

26
IX
2020

Lassen National Park
Moon Waxing Gibbous

After visiting our daughter in Redding, a September day-trip led us to Lassen Volcanic National Park and a visit to a few of its glacial lakes. The volcanic rock holds fewer lakes than in the granitic terrain of the Sierra. So each lake is the more precious. Summit Lake is situated in open forest near the ‘summit’ of the main road that traverses the park. Shadow and Cliff Lakes are found along a 3 mile trail starting from a shoulder of Reading Ridge and both sit in glacial cirques carved out of the ridge. Forest is similar to the Sierra, but striking for its mature stands of Mountain Hemlock. Early autumn gave a crystalline clarity to the day. The photo is from the descent into Shadow Lake.

Pasayten Night Fall

~ mtngriff ~ Leave a comment 
 Night falls.

 Stars climb over the ridge
 holding luminous heads
 high into the darkness—
 clambering ants intent only on their ascent
 oblivious to the solitary glow
 of waxing moon
 commanding western horizon.
 
 Steep avalanche path
 I scrambled up in twilight, reaching 
 its gurgling mouth of water
 waist–high cow parsnip meadow at my feet
 green tops of forest
 crawling over raw flanks of peaks . . . 
 all gone now.
 
 In their stead
 one broken shard of obsidian-horizon
 winds scrapping at the valleys
 the curlew footprint of moonlight 
 on mottled 
 sand–bars of cloud
 brighter, more insistent
 the clambering stars.
 
 A shudder passes
 through me, alone in this
 unyielding—
 as close to twig
 cloud, deer imagined 
 in the darkness, to quartz
 as to my humanity.
 
 Death and life
 make no difference
 for wind 
 rubbing skin to skin
 on the night earth
 for star or forest... 
 or hemlock sapling
 propped 
 against rock–fall boulder.
 

 9 July 1992 
 Rattlesnake Creek
Pasayten Wilderness
North Cascade
Pasayten Wilderness from Slate Peak, Brianhe, 2005 CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)

In the summer of ’92 I made a road trip to visit friends in the ‘greater west,’ stopping at Bend, Oregon, Missoula, Montana, and Lopez Island, Washington. Along the way, I ventured into various out of the way places, including this one-night foray into the Pasayten, close to the Canadian border.