Jamail Center for Legal Research
Tarlton Law Library

Three River Songs

Just this morning, sun splashes
The water, sequins the lawn.
Cottonwoods, alders and ash
Shadow the creek dogwood runs.

Grass waist-high, sweeps of yellow
Vetch and wild roses, redolent.
Then, otters: sleek and fast, wry
Fools of May, hungry, undulant.

‡     ‡

Together into notions,
Into hungry strings of words,
Waiting for wind to urge them
Into song, like young birds.

‡     ‡

From the sun, running out wide
At the mouth, eddies and swirls
Joining the full, cold stream astride
The island, sundering the world.

The Body's Comedy

   "Death does sharpen the comic sense."
                           -- Saul Bellow

Only a faint, but there we were, in the smart
Confusion of the emergency room. Making light,
Making what sense we could of his tenuous heart,
That had seemed fine, for his age, the previous night.
I remember fishing, forty-some years ago,
Climbing out of the canyon toward the trail.
He'd have to rest only every mile or so.
Thirteen, I did not believe his strength might fail.
I heard laughter then, in the dry Sierra air,
But there were only two of us and the Kern's
Muffled roar below. I hear it again: ours
By now, old enough ourselves to have learned
The body's comedy, its ironic turn,
That left him lying on the museum floor.

Blue Heron Through Binoculars

The slough sparkles silver and black
In the evening sun, as if shards
Of light floated in the river at dusk.

A heron strides slowly, ruffled
Breast and belly at the water-line,
The tide ebbing slowly as his pace.

Now, the stillness, the wait, head
And dagger-beak cocked taut and ready.
Silence is what I see in that focused

Place, though where I am, the breeze
Rattles through old cottonwood leaves.
The tall grass heads hiss. Scrub jays

Argue back and forth between the dog-Wood
and the old apple where the feeder
 Is hung. Copeland's Appalachian Spring

Seeps out through the back deck doors.
Odd how its keening lines weave skeins
Of dread through the hopeful melodies:

Sound always defining a fading past.
Does the heron hear in this moment?
Or does hunger concentrate his world

Into a pure circle of sight, a sharp,
Soundless future, so that the wind's
Random voices have become mute?

Through the glass, the heron waits,
Poised, its silence awesome: something
Needed out there, gleaming, coming closer.

Snow Down River

How hard to be as human as snow is . . .
                 -- Charles Wright, "Disjecta Membra"

I haven't seen it snow
this far down river in years.

I know the occasional weather
that makes it: jet stream
bends to the north, the last
rain moves on east, and the valley
fills with frigid air.

Days of this, under misleading
sun, and then more rain,
freezing as it falls. And so

this shawl of snow, slowing
like a message as it falls,
spreading across the boggy,
river-rimmed fields,
shading them first to gray,
then white, and deeper white.

It isn't why it snows,
it's why it snows now,
snow some kind of sign

for this year's end, weather
that unifies, defining gardens
and grazing fields as one,

bare alder, ash and willow,
lawns and dry river grass
as one, highway and road
 bending back to the barn
as one, until the island

floats in silence and thought,
like hope for a quiet year, river
flowing by and on down to the sea.

                      Christmas, 2001

David Filer grew up in the California desert, took degrees in English literature from the University of California-Santa Barbara, and then taught junior high school in San Diego and Eugene, Oregon. From teaching he went on to law school and took up the practice of law in Oregon in 1981, and is currently working for a federal agency (doing employment law) in Portland. Filer's poetry has been published in The Cafe Review, Roanoke Review and Clackamas Literary Review, among other journals.
David Filer: "Blue Heron Through Binoculars" first appeared in Slant (Summer 2003); "Snow Down River" was published in The Oregonian (December 22, 2002).