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About The North Coast times-eagle. (Wheeler, Oregon) 1971-2007 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 1, 1996)
NORTH MfiB TIMES COAST EAGLE in^ww^A^wj«. VOL17NO3 50CENTS — Tlwcwre Rjjetlik¿ JAN/FEBRUARY1996 ^viW •fw>r*v ■•■ '* ’■ *•%* ‘>.**AÓ¿»<***-*í **■' tiäfP- ■>WW ,s :'■-' ? I ’* ! . •* . : . ■ ■ x :'r<* K Vs>’-- . bm J?- \<¡Rsj-ííí»W*‘:' h Hit I’ ?5v¡&/;7*z) fl : ’. r . ' • ‘ . ’ 4 • . , *! WALKING TOUR OF ASTORIA here, where time is washed by rain when space is marinated by water here, in a tripled horizon of ribbons: aquatic, terrestrial, aerial where rivers are confluences of endless fingers feeding the palm of the ocean the land drunken and emerald and where the undefined pewter sky seldom dissolves from its neutral mirror into a blaze of blueness here, in days, in nights, in all seasons in motion moving with the wind murmuring its syllables, its paragraphs rhymed into neighborhoods and green-flamed forest without a map with only an open wonder distant, alone with the mind rolling forever like languages of salmon and sturgeon through these rivers against a backdrop so familiar, so wordlessly known... burrowing inside the velvet and wax mingled by a single plant the azaleas burning like red Christmases and conversations of leaves and going underneath, down toward the precious burdens of seeds seeds folded by the old hands of the wind into rich, dark earth, mazes of roots a seed falling through whispered cities of misted trees pulled by gravity toward a subterranean birth .. and below, where privacy is so extreme it loses its shape where tunnels are long thoughts of unspoken sentences where questions sink into the subsoil of language burrowing below, all the misfortunes, the lost belief crushed into the faces of strangers hearts cocooned like bottled storms like boxed blackness wishing to ascend, to break ground and to begin to walk... ■ ’ . * * to walk into swallowed hours the night so enlarged by sound the endless chorus echoing up the slope a chorus of seals feasting on sushi within an old wooden amphitheater of houses cupping sound and water in a haunting music the music like a soul in a strange aquarium whirling out like a river of incense above the disappearing grid of pilings capped with moss pillars holding up a vanished history a history of work and resource and politics harvests of sea and wood by unending mouths of promises and lies. POEM BY JUANITA HUEBNER DRAWING BY CHARLOTTE BRUHN walking where more of the dead than the living walk with us trapped in quicksands of insomnia the night covering its eyelid over the town with the moon the moon, the stone navel of the sky, pure, patient, old, and ivory a silence passing through the air through the doors of eyes and along the smooth, pine-stained strands of light along arrowing spines of trees above the great celery girders of the bridge and straight through the woven logic of a spider's web stretched between a streetpole and an early star harnessed to an October sky. walking dispossessed of what crowds and collapses the acquisitive world a world nauseous from the fanfare of technology, of trinkets, of estrangement's profusion of artifacts walking the trainless tracks, split rock and rusted rail and toward a burnt horizon of embers a bum's park coved by wild lilacs and cardboard a place of stories made fluent by cheap wine and solitude told to rock-ringed fires told over and over again the smoke winding and thinning from a final bed of ash. and again walking the senses spreading to invent new adjectives for what is beautiful the senses electric in a dervish of leaves in a ripe labyrinth of berries in a crow's dance of ragged wings in a sky salted with stars the senses spearing the flying fish of gossip and contempt using their cold, hard bones as combs for the snarls throwing the rest into a limitless gallery of waves and moons as circular and redundant as the town's memory... % the senses like acid and sugar in a balance the senses flowing like twenty fingers over the braille geographies of sex and secrets... and walking the legs carve elusive limbs and twigs into the unanimous fog the foot arcs a path from oneself to oneself receiving horizons and letting them loose every image carried for awhile like water in two joined hands seeing, erasing and each moment moving, pausing becoming the passage which walks itself..