Death Looking In The Mirror To Face

The reedy knife-edged clouds, spatter
a benign snowfall; a storm moves
menacingly slow above the mountain.
At a glance you grasp peace, power

and ferocity simultaneously. After
dawn on the rise, white frost paints
dun-colored sedge, to expose elk tracks
and bear scat as I trace an old Samish

path to flatter terrain. A field develops
into meadow upon meadow and stretches
outward to an uphill incline of apple
and cherry orchards - trees bare skeletons,

begging to be covered in an eiderdown
of white. In a *terroir* part sand and gravel,
I stand among ancient stones like cobbles
tossed by gods unknown into the old river-

bed, soil like sand, in between dried moss,
an archeology of a defeated archipelago.
Where have the beavers gone, the pelts
that made mountain men wealthy, weary,

yet terrifying? Where are the branch bridges
and damn constructs of animals so practiced
they never spoke, only barked to one another?
The black deer tracks lay bare in ice forms

and shadows among scruffy and untidy,
buttery maples lean anxiously across water;
gone is the penetrating golden light
that gleams on the stream, shriveled

and shrived through in which the torpid fish
still swim. Left are ripples, eddying dead leaves-
cottonwoods, aspens and alders now naked,
not even a promise of warmth in the darling

crimson dogwood. I cut my gaze
and the cinches tethering the bodies.
***