“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth.” –Herman Hesse

Doris Lynch’s collection Swimming to Alaska was published in November 2023 by Bottom Dog Press. The poems describe her Alaskan adventures including a year in an arctic village. Her haibun collection Meteor Hound, published by MediaJazz.com, also came out in 2023. She’s won fellowships from the Alaska Council on the Arts and Indiana Arts Council.

Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Doris, what poems have you brought for us today?

Bird Languages

Before we could speak,
we understood them.
They spoke in riddles: promising
that oak and sycamore would
become ladders to sky, our tongues—
lost leaves--would attach to
mother-cottonwood again.

While our parents slept in their royal
bed, robins, and jays taught us to sing
by whistling, to praise by chortling
sky’s blue and gasp of cloud.
From birch and walnut,
they summoned wind until

it soared through our bodies,
poured out of our mouths.
We knew every bird language then:
oriole, thrush, magpie, cluck
of domesticated chicken, even
the hoo-hoo, too-hoo, hoo
of its distant cousin, the barred
owl. We lay in our cribs
listening, practicing.

Ever since we have yearned,
for riddled bark, for stalk’s spring,
for vibrating grass and stem,
for morning’s fluency of song.

-------------
First Snow After Your Death

How does snow sound from below,
no longer scrimshawed by your boot prints?

Can you still hear rustling--half wind,
half crystals scraping against each other?

Is your mouth still turned away
as though from a kiss?

How indiscriminately snow hides
everything: pond, furrows, copses, boulders.

Later, we’ll offer you clods to breathe, and
irrigate your thirst with rain and snowmelt.

After blizzard’s blast, we’ll go in search of you,
leaving our cursive prayers on top of the snow.

------------
Sound Patina

The dead listen more
than the living. Camouflaged
in dry cornstalks, they stand
attentive as corpse-soldiers.

At night’s hem the disappeared
respond to willows’ sway
as fog’s scent rises from the belly
of Black Bottom Creek.

The missing tune out frog bellows
and the shrieks of night birds.
In the mix of sounds, they chance upon
lovers’ sighs, the laughter of children.

By sea’s border, the unborn hide beneath
bleached logs. They wait, they hesitate,
biding this time before time. Beyond,
a canto of waves leaps toward sky.

----------
Sangre de Cristo Mountains

Here. Now. Not above
but mated to earth
through journeys of clarified
light. The Navajo etched
crosses onto rock walls
in Canyon de Chelly (pronounce Canyon da Shay)
to mark the placement
of stars. Tonight, I watch
one fall. It skips across
Heaven’s meadows, close
enough to grasp with my hand,
close enough so that God’s fiery
hair singes my heart.

-----------
Lake Griffy Woods

Geese stream across the sky.
I walk through Griffy Woods,
surprised by newly bare branches.
Stalwart beech hands cling
to color despite dunness
all around. I remember
how summer knit together
these leaves. A heron lifts
her pond-blue body skyward.
Most of my friends live
far away—one dying.
Tell me, who owns
this silence.

You're listening to the poems of Doris Lynch on the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.