I have begrudgingly begun to search for a sidekick
as I drive into Edison. A Teal parts the water with its
thick body like a wrestler in a bright singlet. I’m headed
towards Bow where I will eat shortbread outside a bakery,
phone tucked under my ear as I wait for a warm loaf of rye
to bring home to my mother. All the fields are so full
of paint horses I can almost feel the leather in my fingers
and the lean across the withers as I turn a barrel and race
for the white line of the country fair arena. School pennants
ripple from the corners of the chain link fence. Cormorants
are a shrieking black macrame on the waves. A stranger
offers me a view through his binoculars—not at the clot
of black birds on the water but at a Brown Heron
whose long ochre neck blends with the cattails. The Bittern
stills under my glass-lensed stare. The grass is an unearthly
saturation of green. A velvet capped cougar may yet be strolling
through the old growth peripheries where antler velvet drapes
the lower branches. Soon the larks will come offering
a set of directions and keeping a running tally.

Up and down the harbor shaped like the eye 
of a needle there is a protection in jaggedness. 
You see, there is a class of predator somewhat 
feline but also ungulate still garlanding 

the upper branches of the old growth. Cedar can 
be worked in a twine, a double twine, 
or false embroidery for decoration and strength. 
A harbor seal slowly turns over on the dock 

and calls the sun to an accounting. It is said 
that this place was settled almost accidentally 
by a slender gig boat dipping into the slitted 
opening in a velvet fog. There at the joining,  

a solar powered recorder speaks at the press 
of a button and offers strings of words hinting 
at places of abundance, past and future. Another 
machine harvests trade winds granting simple solutions. 

As with the earthen currents of the human heart, 
there are five creeks and streams that empty here, 
some hearty some weak. Fortune sits up against 
a quaking aspen’s rough bark with musky oils drizzling 

out a sticky welcome mat. Someone stocks the salmon 
incubators where gulls swirl in the air like ash 
in the vent of a bonfire. If gilled mushrooms grow 
in a fairy ring near a freshly manured upland field, 

then lateral taproots can be stretched skyward, 
rustling the soil in such a way the tree shudders 
in satisfaction. Does this narrow harbor city 
balance or hover over the villages it is covering?

To cross the knobby spine of peaks is to slip realms. One childhood 
truck’s floorboard was entirely rusted to a mosaic of spyglass portals 

to the road and pebbles or dried corn could be tossed against the concrete 
to mark the miles. Glacier Lilies hold perfect arabesques in the cold. 

Strict rays of sun dip-netting into the lake named for many fish which drapes 
the incline beside the lake named for few. Long ago lava flows 

pressed a birthmark over the shallows and punched up foothills 
and left scattered freckles of agates and flat moles of petrified wood. 

Across the mountain pass is horse culture. To this day there are pale clay 
and calcium horizons for painting animals with the marks of war, 

trade, and marriage, embedded into the pediments of two long ridges. 
In the gusty valley where the alfalfa that feeds the fastest horses in the world grows, 

I am holding a bullseye agate to my left browbone peering around the occlusion. 
The hills are covered in Arrow Balsamroot and Purple Lupine warped by the hard 

wind and convex clarity of the rock which was born inside a void of itself.
The first time I ever looked through binoculars was at a mountain goat 

perched against these looming mountains. The alchemy of a telescoping 
lens of focus—patches of snow on the talus grew shaggy, grew horns.