Pepper Trail

City River, Portland

What are we to make of this passing flow
Spanned and re-spanned
Ploughed, scoured, straightened, hemmed in
Played upon, dumped into, withdrawn, re-routed
Altered but not unmade, fluid fact
Defining this bridge town, forever
Making the east side and the west side
Different, the world tilted upstream and down
Keeper of secrets, of ghost-white sturgeon
In the lowest deep, of lost diamond rings and
Stone tools and bodies gone to bones
Of fish and the liquid memories of fish
Salmon, heavy with meaning, moving invisible
Their thoughts of the river unspeakable, their own

Winter of Robins

This is become the season of robins, this wintertime
Robins changed from the ways we have known them
Grown strange in the cold: sturdy, dark, and wild
Raised from the customary earth, they crowd the trees
And the white skies are restless with their flocks
Forever weaving through the ragged air
In and out of the quilted clouds

At morning there is no end to their leaving
And in the blue falling dusk they return
The madrones are hectic with their wings
And the wild roses bend beneath their weight
The disregarded rise before us as a multitude
And so we are taught, and so we learn at last
The awe that was in the robins, always

Pepper Trail’s poems have appeared in Willawaw, Catamaran, Rattle, Atlanta Review, Windfall, Ascent and other publications, and have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net Awards. His collection, Cascade-Siskiyou: Poems, was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry. He lives in Ashland, Oregon, where he pursues his many interests in writing, photography, natural history, and environmental activism.