Here is the latest installment of Poet’s Corner, presented by the Edmonds-based EPIC Poetry Group

Catch & Release

Sober in somber light our fathers stood along
the river and didn’t imagine anything beyond
fat trout rising, to lure voracious cutthroat and rainbow
to take the stonefly or nymph from the tip of a hushing whip of line.
The old men were connected to the river, the spring melt, the snow in the mountain
and winter storms, even the uplifting geology of drifting continental plates–
A past beyond their own broken lives, and those of their own
lumbering fathers, who stood decades earlier
where Tokol Creek chortles into the Snoqualmie River
on mornings grown mistier over the decades.

Here is how you tie a fly:
You begin with knowing what bug is blooming above the water
and the edge flowering with salmonberry and alder just leafing out.
To learn the art of disguise you must first learn what is genuine.
Thread and feather hide a sharp hook.
Then the line must follow the drowsy
dropping of a damsel fly in distress in an eddy
above reactionary trout. One will snap at it.
Keep your tip high to set and reel with intention
feeling the constant pull.
Bring it to the net. Quick and careful
untangle the thing then cradle the cold, living fish
gaping mouth into the current. When you feel it balance, let go.
You must learn the gentle release, so it will live
for our sons and daughters.

James Backstrom

~ ~ ~ ~

Invasive

Hedge bindweed tangles up every stalk or branch
opening a musky bloom to the rising sun,
not closing until the cooing moon cools the darkness.
The vines twist around to bark a branch
until it’s bare and girdled,
entwined and dying,
while white and pinkish lilies flutter in feigned remorse.
You sing to the morning glory,
but slowly they smother everything in the garden
and scaffold on the skeletons.
Someone brought the seeds believing in an invasive beauty.
Who wouldn’t want a more beautiful world?
Someone let the starlings free in Central Park to cloud
all our Octobers in a Shakespearean gloom.
We spread the clover and timothy to feed our sad cows
while slaughtering the bison and antelope.
We grew ivy on school walls to insinuate knowledge.
We planted blackberries for pies. We knot-weeded a false orientalism.
Holly escaped the holidays. The plague always evades our best controls.
The American bullfrog unfurls a sticky tongue and swallows trout minnows
and silences the treefrogs’ song. Even the occasional
duckling ends up in the gullet for good.
What’s native dies off, replaced by a blander world.
The wood grass and salmonberry succumb.
Salal and sword fern retreat.
We are left digging roots, pulling, and clipping back vines of the invasion
while songbirds, stoned on morning glory seeds,
crash against dark windows.

James Backstrom

~ ~ ~ ~

A Neglected Garden

On the best days of summer, the sun rises
above the summit of Mount Pilchuck
and burns like some pagan symbol,
obliterating our vision
of the mountain for a moment or two.
It’s easy to imagine our bodies
becoming nearly transparent and filling with light.
drifting east over the valleys
to live eternal in the sun,
but how would you spend your unnumbered days?
Here the chores seem almost endless.
I water the hanging fuchsia and, in the morning,
wrangle wild rabbits,
who make such an effort to squeeze under my fence
and nibble destruction on my garden in the moments between
their trespass and discovery by our bounding pup.
On the other side of the fence,
they ignore shoots of sweet clover and wild grass.
My yard is plagued with epicurean rodents who hunger for kale and sweet pea.
In July I traveled for almost three weeks, and while I was gone,
thistles grew almost three feet tall.
The radish and leafy lettuce all went to seed.
Only the cucumber and pumpkin
ignored the intrusion and continued to tangle away.
Our cottontails are not fit for eternity,
nervously destroying the garden, leaving only the thorniest
weeds for me to pull,
then startling to an awkward escape
through the fence only to gangly hump in the moonlight
and litter another batch of miscreate peters.
I haven’t the heart for snare or sling.
so the garden suffers.
Live-trap, a friend tells me, but dislocation can be death.
What’s the purpose a poet’s garden?
I give away most of what I grow.
Is life the destroyer of eternity?
Can we find some verse to the sun-god in the sands
of ancient Egypt, that praises the fires of a torch
that someday will burn out?
I know enough to slip into the morning when the world
feels fresh, and back again in the evening.
when twilight plays magic in the garden,
to shoo the rabbits away.

James Backstrom

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

James Backstrom grew up exploring the forests and mountains of the Pacific Northwest. After graduating from the University of Washington, James has spent the last 35 years teaching in the Northshore School District. He and his lovely wife, Jeanette, raised three wonderful children in Snohomish. James has earned several awards for his poetry which has appeared in several magazines including Spindrift, Yours Truly, The English Journal, Poetry Seattle, and the anthology, Sounding on The Salish Sea. He is also a proud charter member of EPIC poetry workshop that meets the second Tuesday of every month.