Mt. St. Helens
(erupted May 1980)
Tagged salmon avoided the ash-filled Cowlitz
showed up at the next clear river,
the Kalama. Only weeks later
fresh animal tracks were seen—
where did they come from?
Shoots of pearly everlasting,
horsetail rushes, beargrass, fireweed,
pushed through crusty layers of ash.
Underground animals—pocket gophers,
mice, and ants—survived the blanket
of sulphurous ash, no one knows how.
Perhaps tunnels trapped oxygen
as divers know spaces in our bodies
hold air. How different from what we told
ourselves when we saw the blackened sky
in full day: “Now they’ve done it,”
we said and moved about numb,
already mourning, not yet for our children
or ourselves but for things
we didn’t know we loved: the worn path
beneath lines of drying sheets
now gray with fallen ash.
(Mississippi Valley Review)
