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2409 Jefferson Street
Port Townsend, WA
360-379-1086

Quentin Wald  

The Highway

My garden this bright day

is the bottom of a blue river of air

between house and great fir trees.

The river flows, a busy highway

carrying hopeful fluff-winged seeds

and swarms of infatuated insects.

Butterflies graze in the flowering depths

and two small birds row upstream.

Then, in the blue, a glint of drifting web

betrays the passage

of the boldest navigator of all;

a wingless mite has launched his bark

on the irresistible stream,

off on secret business of his own.

Biomass

A middle-sized white star drifting in the void

radiates a fierce energy that warms its planets.

One is not so close as to bake to a shimmering desert,

but close enough to liquefy a thin skin of water

by chance seeded with complex atoms

forged in an earlier stellar furnace.

A stew on the solar stove,

the gruel is driven to frantic activity

by the relentless radiant energy of its star.

In the seething mass, each species desperately strives

to turn the whole planet’s substance into its likeness,

searches every crevice, every corner for advantage,

alters form, elaborates, ever complicating

in its blind search, seeking the opportunity to prevail.

Out of this bubbling mass we come,

still driven by chemical imperatives.

We gulp the stored organic material

below us in the earth, swallow the green forests

that convert for us the star’s white light,

spread our substance over the hills and valleys.

By the inexorable working of the brew

we, in turn, will be absorbed

with some change in flavor of the mess,

unless,

            unless,

                        unless. . . .

Astonished to Find Myself

Astonished am I to find myself in this peculiar world.

In crowds of chattering bipedal creatures

who cover themselves with fabrics and hide

their sexual nature, I would be terrified

if I did not know that they think I am one of them.

Amazed am I to find myself

a functioning brain and body inseparably entwined,

capable of mobility and observation, curiosity and reason,

of manipulating nature and subject

to fear and anger and love and delight,

yet circumscribed in time by utter nothingness.

I perceive stars and mountains, rocks and trees

and daffodils and hummingbirds and yet I know

if I could plunge deep into the interior of this world,

orders of magnitude downward in scale,

I would find only strange interacting systems

of waves and singular points.

If I could move on an infinitely grander scale

I would hurtle through endless gulfs of night

sparsely populated by swirling clouds of gas

and fiercely radiating suns destined to explode

in glorious death or collapse

into unimaginable wells of inaccessibility.

Why should there be anything?

But here am I with earth and man

and stars and music in this,

my strange world so briefly glimpsed.

Two Views of the Cathedral, Palma, Mallorca

            I

Stone on stone it soars in majestic equilibrium,

a paean to the perception of space.

Hard white sunlight

is transformed within to voluptuous color

and stewards of an ancient faith

raise resonant voices in praise of eternal God.

            II

Rocks wrested from the earth,

roughly wrought,

are piled high to enclose

a dim, dank space

where ignorant men in barbarous robes

beseech an unheeding god.

A Walk by the Sea

I will walk by the sea.

I could walk on the hill

or in the valley,

I could walk in the field

or in the forest,

but  I will walk by  the sea,

by the sea

where I look upon the curved expanse

that unrolls from this shore

to translucent combers

booming on the coral sand

where palms rattle

in the planetary wind,

by the sea

which conceals strange creatures

cruising in the midnight depths,

the sea that dashes against

dazzling mountains of ice

half a world away.

From the shore

I look upon the timeless

surface of this planet,

the watery realm,

the common aspect

of this living orb.

I will walk by the sea.