"Roll Ever Columbia”
They bag fading lighthouses,
Explore more lone departed posts,
Live in their relationship of ship
To water and shore;
Brave roaring ocean storms
Bar none, faring better, more
Than boats-of-line passing through
That perilous channel ‘washing
Tons’ of Oregonian waves,
Churning in between,
But unlike historic river pilots
Who guided in-bound ships
Over that dangerous bar,
His home doesn’t dominate high
On Fort Astor’s exalted bluffs;
And her love hearkens back to 1812,
Long before any lensed high tower,
Back when townies lit up a blazing
Tree as the brilliant signal flare
To direct to an approaching schooner.
His love lights up her coastal way,
Rivering to her protected harbor;
Not like today in shallow America
Where too many a sparred couple
Forever shipwreck their ‘bows.’
He’s an in-bound ship-of-line
Braving the dangerous headland
And the deep rolling river, but above,
His wild woman glows aflame,
Delights his vessel’s guided way;
There’s no disappointment;
Her shored cape opens with
Welcome, he sings the mark,
“Safe water.”
Oh so verdantly green,
Unfathomably deep,
For life;
Roll on,
Dear Columbia,
Ever and ever and ever.
*Don Bruno de Heceta, Spanish Sea Captain, was the first known
European to discover the mouth of the Columbia River in 1775.
*Captain Meares, on July 6, 1788 tried to find safe harbor on the
northern side of the mouth of the Columbia, but couldn’t so named the
place, Cape Disappointment.
*Woody Guthrie song “Roll on Columbia”
By Daniel Wilcox
First published in
Jeanette Cheezum’s
cavalcade of stars
--
after a fine guitarist’s set,
hidden music
muses
through the spheres
out in the audience
hidden in the middle, two arms
under a table with two full glasses
ignored
two hands commune
caressing
as if the one
and only touching
on earth,
before the fall
for an hour and a half
embodied, that
warm embrace of their fingers
and palms
close slow dancing
no palming
but sheer magic
one body, one spirit
By Daniel Wilcox
First published in vox poetica
--
A Song of Songs Into Olding
Intense clangor—the joyous movement
of rod and belle
of the brash and the subtle
caroled with rubied passion,
they ring with joy their supple skin.
Fertile in consummation, in oneness
these two-to-one
jewel their future
days with melodic movement.
Appealing with rings that couple gold,
One circle—unending, endless, eternal,
They spangle their handed time with madrigals.
The chiming lyric of the sapphire
adorns their sensuous moments.
Embellishments of gemmed time
lay close
jeweled bare on their skin,
on circular strands
Down
the years
Turning irritants, trials, and struggles
Into pure spheres of visioned music,
Shimmering pearls of perseverance
(Unlike the coldness
of the bland flatness,
the flaked shale
of many a marriage's mediocrity).
He and she chime in their aging,
wrinkled skin, touched creases,
caressed emeralds of cherishing,
lasting into the soft opalness
of Olding, their souls flow
warm with mellifluous serenity.
Precious
the seasoned-round romancing,
the ringing, rubied
Song of songs.
By Daniel Wilcox
First published in Word Catalyst Magazine,
and in outwardlink.net,
Psalms, Yawps, and Howls
--
Ever After
Waking up close to you,
Your ‘presence’ covered in our morning’s lips caress
Like the shimmering, luminous night's seal to a sleeping princess,
We’re warm, luscious honeycombed lovers,
Deeply treasured in life-long mellifluous romance
Truly our cherished delicious passion,
Chorus
And the moonlight on the water,
Moon shimmering on the lake
And the stars shine in our room
Through time to time to time
Cherishing
Our heart-welling felt vow
Spectrumed rainbow of our arrowed heart,
Protecting our intertwined soul and body
Not tempted, nor wayward
But delivered from every
Disloyal fragmented moment.
For an eternal now choosing
True love so royal streamed
From time to time to time,
Through the first falling sky-up
On mount passion's verdant peak
High above the desert of briefness,
We begin newly blessed, giving life;
Chorus
And the moonlight on the water,
Moon shimmering on the lake,
And the stars shine in our room
From time to time to time
With the snapping of the corked top
And the delicious splash
Of champagne on a sun-covered table,
And the burgundy bottle never empties
And our two communing glasses shine,
In the shimmering, luminous union
And the moon lights our room
And the stars’ shine on the lake
On our wedding night over and over and over,
You all in white lace
Warm in my embrace
And ever after.
By Daniel Wilcox
First published, different form
in The Shine Journal,
and in selah river
--
Northeast Night
Under the warm stars
Of that Whittier night,
Not Snowbound
Globally warmed,
Sliding,
Not sledding,
A lass and a lad
–Lasted, ever
Clung so close
Warming,
Like maple syrup
Snuggling
Within his
Large parka,
Smoozing,
Below
A maple
Tree
By Daniel Wilcox
First published in
Jeanette Cheezum’s
cavalcade of stars
--
Summer of Love in Philadelphia
Twenty-two flights above Rittenhouse Square
in the spring of the fall you carved a smilin' pumpkin
candled at your windowed level,
a light in the times of horror and stress;
But below, we wandered our nights with
chapped hands interlocked, pocketed in my coat suede.
We walked blind streets of revolutionary warmer, earlier days
and handled paddles, splashing and pulling canal water,
canoeing near the Delaware,
swishing and crossing where Washington
and we escaped near New Hope,
our newest way from countless foes
through spaces of pilings of bridges
of lush foliage over hung.
We were loving friends three times over
in the spirit and the soul and the city;
though warmed in closeness we never caressed,
for you talked of betweeness and violin practice
and your distant boyfriend on the coast.
I called you evenings when I felt
despair, drafted away from Nam, taught
to work with lost children handicapped
by their errant parent's living.
But summer saw you in Quaker action
In raining D.C. for King's impoverished ones
while I never saw you ever after.
Yet your letters far crossed this land of Guthrie
from Reed in the redwoods of Oregon
To south in teeming L.A.
in the movement of the angels, where
I couldn't see clenched hands or shattered glass
like in the new left bank of America so Isla Vista,
Instead searched of the ancient so
coral deep in the past
on the wretched Cross spanning the centuries,
kind hands outstretched and open wide.
No more passioned letters reach
me,
And Oregon no longer knows
you.
But I 'wonder' in this living stream —
And will now hold you up in the Light,
For within my part of you so longs.
By Daniel Wilcox
First published in Wild Violet Magazine,
and in Quill & Parchment,
Psalms, Yawps, and Howls
--
Kiss your true love in the Light,
Daniel Wilcox
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