On The Olympic Coast Poem by Denis Mair

Part I
Walking in the burnt-over forest near Shi-shi Beach
I see gutted trees growing in knobby shapes
They have been half-dead since the Forties
But strips of bark still carry sap to a few green branches
Behind me the old conifers stand like cathedral pillars
But in the huge trunks only the inner bark has live, multiplying cells
The wood is made of cells that stiffened with fibers and became
plugged up with resin
They died and became support elements for the plan of the tree
The bark is layers of corky, plugged-up cells built up in furrowed patterns

The trunks of these monsters are mostly cellulose
Standing there in columnar form, or down on the forest floor, they are uninvolved
There is more living matter in this rain forest than if the land were
simply covered in green slime
Nature taught itself to stack layers of leaf, and thus give room for more life
The whole point was to trick as much matter as possible into the web
But most of the matter that made it is only half-involved
Dead logs littering the seashore
Old stalks of beached kelp, studded with barnacle knobs
Dried sea confetti stinking to the sky
Shampoo bottle from New Zealand, used by someone on a container ship
Glass globes that floated fishnets miles wide
Wood nubs and coke-bottle beads, smoothed in gem tumbler of sand and wave
A deer jawbone with only one tooth: the tooth was deposited like a
diatom's calcareous shell in the chalk cliff of the body
Oddments thrown from anywhere where things were in the thick of being made
All this matter was coaxed into the dance for a while
But the moves were hard to follow, and the stuff got butt-slammed to the side
Most of the dancers at any time are forced to be wallflowers, uninvolved
Like most of the contents of my mind
Snags and deadwood at the bend of a stream
So much is not allowed into my mind at any one time
And the thoughts that manage to trickle through are me: they are the part that is allowed to be alive
And even this much of me is only walking
Just an uninspired two-legged creature walking on the puncheon trail,
in relation to the uninvolved trees, uninvolved

What can I do to be more alive?
Something morbid, intriguing, slightly repelling?
Dostoyevskian convoluted moral retch trip?
Or go to galleries and see people's spirits lodged in paintings?
Or read some thorny book and get a furrowed brow?
Everything will get subsumed under the Uninvolved
No use smoking Maryjane if your sense of wonder is gone
Any communication repeated loses meaning
While an auctioneer with light-up necktie raises funds for the Chamber of Commerce
And legal messengers streak across town carrying Hanford payoffs
You are just parked there, clueless
When you are off on your trip to be active in the Democratic Party
The Rush Limbaugh audience thinks you are badly-painted scenery
Even screaming crowds are frozen in their screaming
Judgments are flying thick and fast; people get stymied deep inside
If you can't keep up with the green edge, you will have to be wood


Part II
I've got to get this stupid preoccupation with matter out of my head. It is the malady of analytical man
By seeing the tree as a column of cellulose, it's easy to be helpless
while others are cutting it down
In a good dance there is no strict boundary between the quick and the dead
I even look for materiality in the social sphere; that is sure to get me nowhere
Suppose the arms-merchant economy is the provider of some people's "needs"
If it's just a structure to deal out resources, why does it have reproductive functions?
You may think it's just part of the scenery, but to IT, you are just
part of the scenery
What a mess being the green edge and the left-behind stuff for each other!

The trees are blessed, if only we can spare them
Their column of wood never fails to hold the green growth high
But our materiality has spines and turrets that come piercing through tender bark

The green edge spreads wide and dangerous into other hearts
Singers join to make slow-floating circles in the mind's sky
SINGERS: join to make slow-floating circles in the mind's sky!