SHITTY CONDON POETRY

A thin, icy, cloud painted crystals overnight onto chilly windshields

Till the morning’s faux summer-sun chased it into low places

Winter’s premature apparition melts in gullies, carved across sloping fields

Behold a golden diamond set in a blue dome of sky, quiet and still as if in permanent stasis

Until Winter’s specter fingers stretch forth, over brittle, golden-fields shivering

Birds bail out of the sky, as if some great dangerous tide is turning

I stand atop a deep cut scar, a canyon, a river’s ceaseless dithering

Gusting winds kick up a haze though no fire is left burning

This bird’s eye view reveals my path through history, those days of triple digits

The river, flashing cold blue grins, teases saying, “I still got your (pretty-good) fishing pole”

It seems unlikely that a river’s fits and starts, its endless fidgets

Would craft such nonsensical wondrous scenes — absent any goal

Though born of different mothers — those distant violent mounts, these carved out hills —

They put on similar fashions, they rock their gravity skirts

Strong gusts comb the blond stubble of this barren high desert, yet my nose fills

With juniper pollen, hints of sage — varieties of earthly dirts

This isolated house — it’s hearth — someone’s metaphor for heaven

Did it nurture its humans, or do tragic skeletons somewhere repose, without testament or will

I can see for miles and miles and not see one Seven Eleven

Or gas station for that matter, my sketchy gas gauge reading empty while slanted downhill

Those grasping spectral fingers from before

Dragging a cloud blanket behind me, to swaddle me in cold darkness

A crowd of fans are waving at the sun they adore

“We really love what you’ve done with these pressure gradients”, they confess

Winter seems certain to win this seasonal battle, yet one pinwheel yet strives

To blow the snow off the mountain (with picturesque backlighting)

The vanquished apparition rises from the valley again, as if with infinite lives

Who would have thought 23.5 degrees of tilt would guarantee forever fighting

WASHINGTON ROADTRIP / ONLY TWO CDs

A plaintive yodel emerges from static on the radio as my car crests another hill. I think it could be Hank Williams and marvel that a human voice in a scratchy recording can cross time, defy death, and thereby interact with the living. I snatch snippets of song from the static like moments of sunlight streaming through the dappled shade of an immense oak. The road descends into a valley and the static roars and the strident condemnation of some holy faker (adopting the cadences of a Martin Luther King speech) overwhelms simple beauty with bankrupt religiosity (apparently content doesn’t matter as long as it’s punctuated with plenty of ‘Jesuses).

I punch the console and switch to one of only two CDs I find in the newspaper, maps and camping miscellaneously slowly growing in the unoccupied passenger seat. Regina Spektor sings:
“He stumbled into faith and thought,
‘God, this is all there is?’”



This lyric out of context launches a cascade of fledgling responses.

He stumbled into a scientific world view and thought, the world is full of mysteries, and we can’t even adequately define life…time to think of an experiment.

Or

Later that night after parking at Palouse State Park, I set out the sleeping bag in the bed of my pickup and lay there looking up at a shockingly incandescent Milky Way (there being no nearby hub of light pollution). It’s just a portion of an arm of our own spiral galaxy in a universe of such galaxies and overwhelmed, I quietly asked, ‘God, this is all there is?’ and enjoyed the irony of it and fell asleep smiling for a change.




Some time ago, I went to a lecture/presentation at the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center (in The Dalles) that dealt with Ice Age Floods. It gave Bruce Bjornstad, author of On the Trail of the ICE AGE FLOODS, a promising venue to peddle his book. Evidently, back at the end of the last Ice Age, when huge prehistoric ice beavers roamed the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, substantial glacial lakes formed behind their poorly engineered ice dams. When the dams failed, walls of water so tall that you’d think Mr. Bjornstad was just making crap up would rush across Washington and carve unique river canyons along tectonic faults in the layered basalts of the Mid-Columbia Basin. Palouse Falls and its canyon are said to be artifacts of this dynamic process.

Plumber’s Crack National Monument
(An example of a fault)

You’d think a story like that would draw big crowds of voluptuous geology coeds but most of the people at the lecture were evidently on some field trip from an old folk’s home and were under the mistaken impression that they had entered the cafeteria. When Mr. Bjornstad opened the floor for discussion, the first question he got was from a cranky old man who demanded to know why the chairs had been rearranged. That spurred a little bewildered blue haired lady, craning her head up and down to peer through massive bifocals, to ask where the tables had gone, what were they to do with their plates when they got them, and speaking of plates, when were they going to be served.




Ice dams failed so often and so completely that the prehistoric beavers who depended on them eventually became extinct. Even so, gnawed basalt sculptures stand in mute testimony to the giant rodent’s resilient front teeth.

Hikers in the Columbia Gorge are often coddled by trails that have about as much to do with getting in touch with the wilderness as does an amusement park ride for very stupid children.

This is not so much the case in Podunk Washington where ill defined trail systems tend to weed out outdoorsmen who can’t tell the difference between an established path and a marmot trail.

Following a marmot trail back around a ridge to the top of the falls, I found myself in a zigzag canyon that tended to support the idea that opportunistic descending water long ago took advantage of faults and other weaknesses in stacked basalt layers to pursue a path of least resistance.

Still, if something half of the size of Lake Michigan scoured out this landscape as it poured to the ocean in a cataclysmic flood, the scarred cliffs have since been busy methodically hiding the evidence by tossing down rocks now and then to soften the harsh edges.

This I imagine is part of god’s great plan to lure evolving hominids back into proximity of life sustaining water and fertile valleys where new cities and cultures can take root and grow up for the next great cycle of apocalypses.

Regina Spektor lyrics arc from synapse to synapse,
“God can be funny… … when presented like a genie who does magic like Houdini

Or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket and Santa Claus"

“…God can be so hilarious”

Regina Spektor

“The pictures in his mind arose

And began to breathe

And all the gods and all the worlds

Began colliding on a backdrop of blue…”

Regina Spektor

Today, we sit atop windblown dunes of silt and dust and clay (loess) that with a little prodding have become some of the most productive agricultural lands the world has ever seen.

This also is the fruit of the last Ice Age, when the glaciers descended from the north, chewing and regurgitating the mountains in their paths – tenderizing stone.

…processing the layers of lava and crust laid down from the beginning…

…so that in an instant of time - a blink in the history of a universe - life dances across the surface of a rock hurtling through the vastness of space...

I stumbled into Washtucna seeing miracles in every direction.

Stars collapse and explode, comets slam into Jupiter and whiz past our orbit, volcanoes detonate, the earth quakes and folds…

… floods periodically scour the land…

…the pattern of decomposition is written in the crystals of formation…

…and the first replicator’s imperative to multiply and be fruitful is passed on in an unbroken line, encoded and kept safe in the heart of every living cell.