Artwork Description:
Road to Corvallis
Ash and silt, borne on ancient airs,
ancient waters—you draw them into your eyes,
stria and strata, silent fires of color, composed
before man, in the midlands of time.
You linger,
give the earth your hours, as she gives you yours—
hours that hover now on the slender border
of winter and spring—green, an immanence yet
beneath winter’s white grass, wildflowers
suspended between bud and bloom.
All quickens.
The harrier’s love cry, held there in that instant
between release and arrival, on plateau-winds,
in the sky….
You draw that moment’s sky into your lungs,
sunlight shimmering on the dark drift
of the creek. A view, steeped in mind,
become vision…these hills, the opened soul
of the Mother, voluptuous, rounded, tempered
with the ages, lovelier than her foliage, an aurora
of soil. You contract before her, near to nothing,
and then you expand.