Thirteen  Poems

by  my  Grandfather

Gordon  Stace  Smith

written from 1930—1960

from

In  the  Kootenays  and  Other  Verses  

and

  Far  West  and  Book  of  Sonnets

The Old Homestead

That stumpy farm — I see it now —
My sturdy father at the plough;
In crooked drills the virgin soil
Would register his daily toil.
Old Dox, the cow, in the corral. 

The startled tinkling of her bell —
Her calf — contrary, gorged and plump —
Tethered to a birchen stump.
The wooden trough wherein I’d keep
Great water-creatures that do creep;
With brothers there, on business terms.
For hours I’d sit and barter worms.
Ten slimy leeches I would trade
For an Indian arrow-head;
And, should it have a double prong,
A beetle full three inches long.

My mother and her old sun-bonnet
(A theme itself to weave a sonnet!),
From peep of dawn till dewy eve
Her little tasks she’d never leave.
While we, not dreaming of her cares.
Excelled in mischief unawares;
Or in the river’s shallow wave
All day our youthful limbs we’d lave;
Or by some pool whose limpid creek
Would mirror towering Granite Peak,
We’d run about, with naked toes.
And sun-tanned shins and unkempt clothes.
Save once a week, when we were dressed
And polished in our decent best —
Perhaps on a Saturday or Monday,
Uncertain just which day was Sunday.
Wild, primitive, obscure, remote
From carriage, thoroughfare or boat;
A little world all of our own.
Where visitors were things unknown;
A stranger passing by the gate,
A nine-days’ wonder to relate.

The old log house, all ivy-green.
Through twining leaves the doors half seen.
Within whose walls each night (not late!)
To-morrow’s plans we would debate;
And when the clock struck drowsy nine.
The good-night kisses passed in line;
On bended knees, around our chairs.

We’d race and rattle through our prayers.
Too thoughtless to know what about.
Too innocent to dream a doubt.
Then tripping lightly up the stairs
To (poppied sleep that knows no cares!)
The attic where, in dreams, I’d span
The period ’twixt boy and man —
A vision, when attained, we find
We’ve left a paradise behind.

In Solitude

When oppositions all my hopes confound;
When sometimes seeming wedded to all woe
When ceaselessly the storms of ruin blow
And tumble my big castles to the ground:
And when I hear the curfew’s solemn sound
Knell that a broken-hearted day doth go —
Yes, and when I think of long ago
How loveliness was smiling all around —
Then in some solitary silent place
I hide away and sweetly meditate
On some lorn verse, admitting nothing base
Into the mind — and then, however great
The sorrows are, this heavenly solace brings
Such joy that I forget all earthly things.

Home Longing

When from this desolation I return
And see again the garden and the gate
Of my far home, where love and gladness wait.
And children — all unconscious of the stem.
Harsh things of earth that we in travel learn —
Come laughing down the pathway all elate
To meet this weary derelict of fate
And claim their kisses, love … when I return …

Ah! then shall I be ready to forego
This empty quest of fortune far abroad;
To live the simple life, with spade and hoe.
Nearer to Nature, closer to my God:
With books and love and children and sweet home —
When these are mine why should I longer roam?

The Lass That Came Over The Sea

Long since, on a beautiful spring
A lassie came over the sea,
From Scotland. And what did she bring
from that country for me?

Some heather, a kiss and some tears;
Sweet memories, roses and rue;
And shining through all these years,
she brought me a heart steel-true.

And now, when the twilights are long
The lass that came over the sea
Sings gaily a sad Scotch song,
Sings to her children — and me.

Water-Lilies

I love those large, broad-leaved, Canadian water-lilies
With green and yellow petals and strange purple hues within;
And it’s sweet on meadow waters when the evening still is —
In glib canoe the silences and solitudes to win.

To skim along the edges of the pristine, tall bullrushes;
To watch the mirrored sunset on the placid waters fade —
As the paddle dips make music then, between the hushes.
To gather water-lilies in the cooling twilight shade.

Exaltation

How often have I, in the sleepy night,
Stirred up, to put on paper, fourteen lines! 
Hemming my wild thoughts in those tight confines.
And yet they lilt their joy with feet so light
I scarcely know the message I indite:
Only I know that, when the morning shines,
No halo round my lowly pillow twines,
And all the exaltation’s taken flight.

For Psyche speaks, and she the clearer speaks
The more we are unconscious of the clay
And out of self, in the forgotten hour:
Then truths we have absorbed through days, or weeks
Or years, unfold as in a crystal ray
Like from the bud the rose bursts into flower.

Time, Men and Moths

From where the slow, deep Kootenay joins the Lake
A little mountain prairie  stretches out.
So broad and beautiful that it could make
A thousand homes — with the attendant shout
Of the ignoble mob, brawling about
Their acres — save that the mild, melting snow
Rolls from the hills each Spring and floods the flats below.

But this is a large boon Nature provides
To hold her virgin loveliness untamed;
A wilderness of mountains on all sides.
Unnumbered, dim, and often, too, unnamed 
As when the first fire of the pioneer flamed
Into the dusk. And changes barely mar
The meadow, where the many river-channels are.
Yet on the foothill flares the human stain.
For there a little village has been born —
Prosaic, commonplace and very vain.
That does itself with snobbery adorn;
There dark Hypocrisy on Sunday morn
Crawls into Church; while gossips, steeped in pride.
Sneer at the hapless maid should she once step aside.
But in the woods the shy birds still rejoice;
And calm and quiet is the river’s shore.
Though changes come, even by Nature’s choice:
The Redman’s buckskin teepee is no more.
And all his noble race is nearly o’er!
And gone the grazing herds of caribou
That, not so long ago, these grassy meadows knew.

Along the margins of the river rose
A narrow forest of tall cottonwoods;
The work of centuries, and the repose
Of creatures numberless in Summer’s moods;
And overhead a thousand interludes
Of varied nesting birds among the leaves.
With the low undertone the tireless river heaves.

Then suddenly a little moth appeared;
The tent leaf caterpillar found the place!
And soon the ancient forest’s grandeur seared.
And did each leaf, from every branch, deface —
Then death and desolation came apace:
We watched the whole enactment to the last,
Till, through the leafless boughs, the Summer breezes passed.

It chanced that, when again the winds were warm
And one whole year had numbered all its days.
An eager fire, born of a thunderstorm,
The ruined forest swept in sudden blaze,
That lingered long into the Autumn’s haze:
We watched it, every night, like flames of gold,
Leaping from tree to tree and craving to enfold.

Out of the ashes, hiding all deform,
A field of honeyed fireweed blooms and blows;
A flower of Hope, like rainbow after storm.
Where most there is Despair there best it grows.
Bringing a gladness everywhere it goes:
A sense of trust that the great Maker planned
All the unnumbered ways we cannot understand.

By The Kootenay River

I rise from my writing a moment
And open the door of my cabin
To look to the mood of the night.
Of the night that is lonesome and late —
And what is the gain?
There floats the moon on her hulk
Through her mythical sea.
To the south and the west
Is a look that is wistful;
Black clouds to the norward.
And here, in a chasm of wonderful blue.
Is bright Venus, a wonderful star.
A long stretch of meadow;
The glint of the river far off,
Like a passion of beauty;
Great mountains in profile beyond,
Like the graves of dead gods.
What of it?
I, with the soul of a poet,
I, with a vagrant’s heart,
I, with my hair tossed wildly
And tears in my eyes — unsatisfied still!

A Nocturne

Toll! the bells of midnight toll.
Waking me from reverie.
Bringing back my wandering soul
From the home where it would be.

Yes, I tip-toed (if a ghost
May so tip-toe) to the door.
Slipped inside and left it closed;
Noiselessly I crossed the floor —

A white sheet of moonlight streaming
Through the window on the bed
Where my little girls lay dreaming:
“God be good to them!” I said.

On the dresser, in strange freaks.
All their little clothes were piled.
And I kissed their moon-lit cheeks.
And I fancied that they smiled.

Ask them, Mother, when they waken.
If they saw me in their sleep?
Say that fairies must have taken
What I meant themselves to keep —

Baskets of delicious fruits.
Boxes full of sweetmeat rare.
Golden toys and silver flutes.
Talking dolls with curly hair —

Naughty fairies! but they often
Do the same to you and me.
From the cradle to the coffin
Fairies steal our cake and tea.

Does She Think Of This?

Sombre, sombre is the dwelling
That so lately was so free;
Sombre is the ghost-voice telling:
This is where she longs to be.

Every room in which I enter
Holds some thing she cherished so:
Here’s a trinket that I sent her
Half a hundred years ago.

Little does it ease the aching
That the portraits smile again —
Golden memories awaking
Mingled with a stab of pain.

In the dark, when late returning,
Sad and lone the old home seems;
No light at the window burning,
No smoke from the chimney streams.

Footfalls, light as feathers, pass me
As my sleepy eyelids ache;
Sounds, like whispered thoughts, address me
When I waken — half awake.

Nothing is the same, nor ever
Can be as it was before:
Only we must hope forever,
Hope — and awful Fate implore! 

Nocturnal

Long after midnight and I close my book,
And hear the rhythmic silence of the room.
What does it matter? — let my thoughts consume
Another hour in this Loved Authors nook:
I would not pale if jocund Shakespeare’s spook
Should enter, or should old FitzGerald loom
Beside his volumes! Fear, that myth of doom,
Is conquered: straight into his eyes I look:

I count not Past nor Future any more;
Eternity is not to be, but is.
And all is well. The deaths that were my toll
Were even as the change that lies before;
And I am part of God’s metropolis
Of earths, of stars, and that more distant goal.

Little River

Why hurry, little river, on your journey to the sea?
Just linger where the lilies are along the shores with me.
And all the flowers of April how they beckon you to stay,
And I who am your lover too — but still you run away!
Ah, your journey is like mine, little river; while we go
We must work and serve and carry and part from friends you know.
Yes, from those we love the most we must hurry to our fate,
There to suffer our sea-changes — for time and tide won't wait.

Golden Light

Dwelling with his volumes olden
In his garrett closed from all;
Vainly seeking there the golden
Secrets of this cosmic ball.

Crammed with lore and learned madness,
With his dream of golden light:
Found a world of antique sadness
In those books of perished night.

Then from out his dingy garret —
Leaving all that lore and rhyme —
Walked he in the living air, at
Sun-peep, in the August time.

Then he wept for all the wasted
Years spent in the Perished Night,
For he knew that now he tasted
What he longed for — Golden Light.

Marianne  Williamson

The  Soul  of  Citizenship

YouTube video

visionary  campaign  for

President  of  the  United  States

the  unnamed  one 

i am the available passion of the world

eros flames this heart and belly

ecstasy floods

in streams of liquid fire

through these veins and arteries

swells this flesh

creation of a newly emergent and unnamed one

 i am conceived

thrust forth

i am the fierce and radical unveiling of a new order of being

i am the blood of the east in the wine of a new pressing

santiago california beijing and the cape

dissolve

in a bright new vintage

 a bold virility expands outward

through the atomic structure of this body

swollen with the blood

the wine of new life pressing

i am the virile uprightness of the world and its people

good and evil disappear into my liquid presence

 i am neither good nor evil

there is no choice

i am neither permission nor restraint

i neither abandon nor withhold

i am penetrating

i am fertile

i am whole

 i am the thrust of the divine

the energy of a new unqualified intercourse

i am the ecstasy of the whole body

a seminal firing in the womb of a new order

i am the available passion of the world

 

david barnes

Among  the  Nations

Don  Hynes

The trees will sort it out,

along big rivers and creeks

running down from the mountain,

in forests along the coast

where elk and bear ramble.

Salmon know the water 

as wolves know the herd.

We manage from sentiment

but the earth is precise,

her exact measure disguised

by great abundance.

All our old stories

feature pride and vanity;

that’s how we got here

while coyotes work the brush,

deer browse the dense green.

The plum trees push up

against layers of cement

cracking them like child’s play.

It will get sorted and I hope to be there

when the Columbia rolls free

and we again take a humble seat 

among the tribes and nations.

The  River's  Interest

William  Dietrich

Northwest  Passage

from the Epilogue

Perhaps the assumptions were wrong. I talked of this book once to a former college professor of mine named Robert Keller, and he in turn revealed his intended approach to the Columbia for an upcoming history class he was teaching. During a mountain climb, Keller recounted, he discussed the river's development with Jonathan Karpoff, an economist at the University of Washington. Karpoff was asked to tick off the various interest groups embroiled in the Columbia's future and duly listed fishermen, Native American tribes, farmers, the aluminum industry, utilities, environmentalists, barge companies, recreationists, ranchers, and so on. Keller nodded, thought for a while, and then said, “You forgot one interest. Do you know what it is?”

No, Karpoff replied, thinking his tally pretty complete.

“The river's interest,” Keller said.

As my former teacher recounted this, I'm sure I looked puzzled. “The river's interest,” he patiently repeated. “What is the interest of the river in staying a river? What is the right of a river to remain a river?” All the other values were based on humans and our competing needs. None suggested that nature—the natural Columbia—might have a value outside the immediate interests of our own species. Or that such a value was perhaps as important, even more important, than the others.

Karpoff, an avid hiker and outdoor enthusiast, does not buy this idea. Humans have interests and humans have rights, he told me, but to argue that a river has a right “is a semantic game.” It is simply a means, he thinks, to empower a view that people have of how a river should be used. “There is no other way to weigh value than through human benefits and costs,” he said. “To pretend not is like arguing against gravity. It just is.” Environmentalists may believe that the cost of developing the Columbia is too steep for its benefits, but they cannot escape the fact that the argument is about human values, not some intrinsic natural one: rights are something we assign, not something that salmon or rivers or rocks acquire by the mere fact of their existence.

Karpoff, in fact, used the development of the Columbia as a lesson in cost-benefit analysis for his business administration students. Most agreed with his analysis. His experience has been that even though students don't necessarily like damming the Columbia, they usually conclude that hydropower representatives have the stronger argument. Not all, however. Some students sense a river's interest after all: that the fabric of existence no more revolves around humans than the sun revolves around the earth. One woman accepted the economic analysis until she visited Bonneville Dam, Karpoff recalled. “She was so struck with the incongruity of the dam on the river that she couldn't deal with the analysis,” he said. “She told me her policy position would be based on her emotional reaction to that dam, across that river.”

In the summer of 1993 I accompanied Keller and his class down the route of the Columbia, a tumultuous, exhausting journey in which the students and the people they met were by turns proud of, angry at, wistful about, and awed by what has been done to the river. We talked of an untamed Columbia none of us will ever see. We tried to imagine the world our ancestors willingly traded for this one.

In his celebratory book Columbia, author Earl Roberge, who canoed some of its wild Canadian stretches shortly before their damming, predicted that future generations would not lament the loss. “The fact that it is a controlled river, with much of its scenic wilderness subdued, may cause a few twinges of nostalgia for the beauty that was, but weighed against the manifold benefits provided by the controlled river it must be admitted that the changes have been beneficial to the great majority of the people whose lives it affects,” he wrote. In the comfort of a city lit by regimented water pulsing through dams a hundred miles away, it is hard to deny Roberge’s argument. The Columbia is as proud and complex and irreversible a piece of human environmental transformation as can be imagined, as magnificent in its new guise as in its old. Yet it is a magnificence with an emotional hollowness, a glory that has lost its ability to startle. With our computer programs that pace the river we are like omniscient river gods, so much in control of our creation that we become bored with its predictability.

In the aboriginal dawn of the river country some early native apparently dreamed of dams, set the future in the past, and wove a story about its destruction. This Coyote story, or the hundreds or perhaps thousands told in the American West, resonates with modern power. It is a story of how Coyote brought salmon to the river people—how he outwitted the Swallow Sisters who had blocked Nch-I'Wana [Big River] with a dam.

The people were starving because the fish could not ascend the Columbia and they appealed to their hero for help. Coyote was too well known to approach directly, so he craftily turned himself into a baby, was strapped onto a cradle board, and set adrift down the river. Eventually he bumped up against the dam. “Oh, look at the poor baby!” the Sisters cried, taking the infant home with them. The next day the Swallow Sisters decided to leave the child while they went to the mountains to dig roots, and as soon as they disappeared Coyote turned back to his real form and set to work attacking the dam. When the Sisters returned he once more became a cooing baby and they did not suspect anything was awry. This went on for four days.

On the fifth day the root digging stick of the youngest sister broke, an ill omen suggesting something must be wrong. When the Sisters rushed back unexpectedly early, there was Coyote, prying away at their dam! The Swallow Sisters attacked. Again and again they darted in angrily as Coyote dug, but he warded them off until the dam was critically weakened. Finally the barrier gave way with a roar. Its debris formed the rocks and rapids of Celilo Falls, and the cradle board a nearby outcrop. The salmon could swim by to feed the people.

The swallows still build today, but only mud nests. Their return each spring signals the return of the salmon.

No magic babies bump up against the spill gates of modern concrete dams. They are so monumental as to seem immovable, so permanent as to make us prisoners of our own logic. Talk to engineers, farmers, biologists, or fishermen, and most will sooner or later remark, with pride or wistfulness or resignation, “Well, I don't think they're ever going to take out those dams.”

Some natives hold a different view. The dams may last centuries, true, but to the Columbia's tribes that is a blink of time. Sooner or later dams will fail, or become silted up, or their power will prove unnecessary. When that happens the old river will come back, and the River People will still be there to welcome the return of the Salmon People.

The irreversibility with which the Columbia River dams are regarded by the rest of us is intriguing. All were constructed in just half a century, eight of the fourteen in the 1950s and 1960s. They are hardly impregnable to change. One end of Grand Coulee has been blown off to add its Third Powerhouse. The dams are immovable in our imagination, however.

Should anything have been done differently? The dams are of undeniable benefit, producing energy, food, navigation, and flood control. Yet it is unlikely that the present complex would pass environmental and economic review today. Would Grand Coulee and Hells Canyon dams be allowed to choke off thousands of miles of salmon habitat without either better mitigation or modification? I doubt it. Would the Columbia Basin Project pass economic muster? To date, its second, uncompleted half has not. Would a new dam be allowed today without better provision for fish passage facilities? Certainly not. Would the Columbia be used today to lure energy-consumptive industries such as aluminum smelting and to promote electric heat? Not with quite the same enthusiasm, at least. If done over, the damming of the river would, with the benefit of today's perspective, proceed much more slowly, with greater attention to fish and water conservation. We would exhibit more caution.

Certainly the three uppermost dams on the lower Snake River, for all their value in power and navigation, would be unlikely to be built again. They proved decisive in destroying Idaho salmon runs that once represented nearly half the Columbia's total fish resource. Yes, their average power contribution of six hundred and forty-eight megawatts is significant, nearly enough to light Portland. But their generation is almost equaled by what Northwest consumers have managed to conserve in recent years, and is dwarfed by a river system generating twenty-five times as much average hydroelectric energy. “I don't think we could build those dams today,” said Ted Bottiger, the Northwest Power Planning Council member.

No serious proposal has yet been made for dismantling dams of this scale. With no agency in charge of the river, none has been bold enough to even study if some of the engineering should be reversed, even though that is one of the most obvious options. Nor has any agency ever considered seriously the second most obvious solution: conceding that the Columbia has been fundamentally changed, that salmon can never thrive in an ecosystem so drastically altered, and that the huge sums being spent on Columbia salmon in what has so far seemed a futile rescue attempt would be better applied to coastal streams elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest or Alaska where fish have a realistic chance of thriving.

Ask environmentalists and biologists where to start revamping the Columbia system, however, and it is usually on the lower Snake. While deconstruction is the most drastic option, far more likely in years to come is continued tinkering with the dams and reservoirs to get salmon past them. The exact kind of tinkering remains unclear. If given billions of dollars to fix the dams, “I'm not sure what I would do next,” confessed Don Bevan, head of the recovery team trying to rescue Snake River salmon.

On the Columbia River itself. Grand Coulee Dam remains too high, its power and irrigation too vital, and its reservoir too long to entertain serious thought of returning fish back to the upper watershed. Kettle Falls is drowned as effectively as the Titanic. Of the fourteen dams on the main river, only John Day has been closely scrutinized. Its sixty-mile reservoir is the longest that salmon still traverse, so proposals have been made to lower the water level six feet in hope its currents would quicken, urging young salmon to the sea. Yet even many fish biologists are skeptical that such a drawdown would noticeably increase the return of adult fish.

Recognizing today's second thoughts, the federal government has launched a System Operations Review of the Columbia that includes eleven federal agencies, four states, several utilities, seven tribes, twenty citizens' interest groups, a score of private individuals, and several universities. Its task is to review the conflicting uses of the river and reconcile them. No radical changes are anticipated.

And that is about the limit of our modern imagination. The dreams of natives notwithstanding, the Columbia is perceived as beyond the reach of Coyote, a necessary sacrifice to technology and civilization. “It's never going to be the way it used to be,” I was told by Dick Nason, the fish and wildlife operations manager for Chelan PUD. "The environmentalists say let’s put the river back the way it was. You can't. It's a people problem. There's too damn many people. They need the resource.”

Yet what truly intrigues us about the Great River of the West? It is the voice of regret that permeates the expressions of human pride. It is the dream of the Columbia once again as a river, bucking and roaring and steaming with muscle, thrashing salmon leaping against its foaming tide. So if I can dream Coyote dreams for a moment, it would be about the disappearance of a different dam. The Dalles: the one that silenced Celilo Falls.

During that long, wearying classroom journey down the length of the Columbia, we stopped on a high bluff above Celilo Falls, gaining a grand view. Below was a river that has become a broad lake, flat and silent as the lid of a tomb. A Tidewater tug and barge slid past the point where the falls had been. Allowing such cargo to pass is one of the proudest achievements of American engineering. “This is really depressing,” whispered student Teresa Mitchell.

That night we sat around a campfire at Beacon Rock. Bob Keller recalled the disorienting sensation of taking one of his classes in a single day from the bottom of the Grand Canyon to the nighttime desert blaze of Las Vegas. The students traded observations of what we had seen and felt and thought, some of the women revealing they had dreamed of Coyote. We waited with amused anticipation for a comment from Jim Smith, a teacher who worked with troubled kids on the Swinomish Indian Reservation. He was perhaps the quietest person in our group and the least predictable, the oldest but the one with the most childlike ability to look at things with innocent clarity. Smith kept a certain wry equanimity toward all we saw. He talked to farmer Grady Auvil about how to cut an apple to find the star pattern inside. After a Hanford tour guide pointed to two buck deer with impressive racks of antlers resting in the shade of a tree at the nuclear reservation, he suggested, “Maybe it was one deer with two heads.”

That night by the campfire Jim Smith remarked that the overlook at Celilo made him wonder what the falls must have sounded like. It made him wonder how high mist from the rapids must have climbed. “It might have reached all the way up that bluff,” he said. “I wonder if it would have been moist and cool up there.”

I wonder, too.