Pumice and Basalt from Mount St. Helens, 1981

I had visited Mount St. Helens a year after its 1980 eruption and brought home this pumice and basalt. They measure roughly 1-1/4 and 1-1/2 inches along their longest axes, respectively. Tonight's episode of the Weather Channel's Forecast Earth was dedicated to volcanoes, including the news that Mount St. Helens is forming another lava dome.

 

My visit -- including the sight of a fawn nibbling a spring-green shoot poking out of the ash -- had inspired this poem:

 

Sanctuary, Mount St. Helens

 

The softened grey plain under my feet

tames roaring magma. I sink gently,

in a free-fall

of weights made light

and unfamiliar,

buoyed in a slate tide,

poured in volcanic stasis.

 

The dull floor etches my footprints

in shattered glass, on a field

with no vanishing point --

and all around me

chipped, denuded peaks

change distance,

edge upon stark edge.

 

Today I must trust this mountain,

stepping carefully on muffled ground

cued to tremors, murmurs, the silence

of halted growth. A timid fern

curls around a dead, twisted birch woven

in a tangle of birches.

Wild greens lay their thin stalks

over macrames of charred wood

in gauzed lava, shaded

neither wholly black,

nor wholly white.

 

At any time, the earth might shake

and sway, sifting centuries of dust,

tripping young deer, swallowing pumice and wildflower,

and the air crackle with sirens

echoing like birds off the mountain face, or caught

in the hollowed bones of melting rock.

Below me are pulverized graves, layers

of life and death and

life again.

I hold my breath

to read quick

cryptic traces of seismic thoughts.

 

And if I stare outward long enough,

I can see new shoots from a simpler age

rise, reborn and ancient

out of motionless ash.

Done