A Poetry Of Place: Dillingham, Alaska / Part 1
When I moved from the tree-less Arctic to the thickly forested landscape of Dillingham, Alaska, I walked the looped road of my neighborhood trance-like. I swooned for the cedar and birch bark of trees, the curl of fiddlehead ferns, the lupin and the blueberry, salmonberry patched tundra. It was much an edible landscape. Caribou lichen beseeched me to bend low and gaze upon its bonelike color and shape. Seabirds laid their eggs where friends fetched them to bake with and celebrate the subsistence life with each bite.
Salmon was hurled up on to the beach by gill netters who had more than they needed. I remember one slapped my belly before I grabbed it and tucked it in a bag. A nearby neighbor welcomed me into her garden pointing out the Himalayan blue poppies whose colors echoed the nearby wave. I had seen them before growing in Juneau’s co-op garden where I once had a plot. Garlic grew near and spiraled into the sky; living, organic sculpture.
My neighbor also had an owl house she hung up high in the branches of a decades old alder tree. She told me when the baby owlets hatched the paper-like petals of the Himalayan blue poppies would open and unfurl. Large, red fishing floats peppered her yard. So newly out of the Arctic, it seemed to me a wonderland.
I later learned from Pretty Ann, the taxi driver who often gave me a ride, that my garden host owned a gift store called the “Cracker Box.” Too, she told me about the two adult twin brothers that lived just around the curved were called A and B.
The first poem I wrote in Dillingham is a dance prancing from here to there as I navigated this new landscape and its populace; the two legged, four legged and winged. Too, the standing birch, alders and firs that were dabbled at their understory with violets, daisies and other forest flowers. It celebrates my curiosity of returning to a colorful landscape, to the red tailed foxes I spied in the morning seeking salmon heads in nearby barrels and the moose that grazed so near I thought one was a spying neighbor.
Joy; this poem is a dance of joy that ribbons between Dillingham, Juneau and the Slope; a short autobiographical map. That map includes roaming mutts and titling school bus shelters. It ends with a declaration of my preference for Himalayan blue. Lastly, I included a Google image of Himalayan blue poppies so you may celebrate their beauty too.
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Poppies
Pretty Ann,
the cabbie,
told me the man in the key lime house
on Nerka,
not the Loop,
is nicknamed A,
his twin brother, B.
Past roaming mutts,
peeling skins of birch
and the tilted bus
shelter.
We drove.
Pointing to large red fishing
floats in a yard,
she said
They own the Cracker Box.
I visited the house once.
in May.
In my thick
parka.
The garden, lush and landscaped,
evenly-spaced plots.
My host pointed to alder branches
and swooned.
When owlets cry
sky blue poppies
unfurl papery petals.
I’ve seen those flowers
in Juneau’s co-op
garden,
where once I kept a lot.
harvesting mostly potatoes,
where poppies stood
majestic
on rare sunny days.
Mostly rainy summers,
in the
same bed
garlic pointed like green needles
north.
On the Slope
yellow poppies flecked tundra grass;
ruby, turmeric
abreast Arctic cotton,
whose heads flutter
like laundry in late April gales.
I’ve not forgotten Alaska’s
famed field flowers
used to measure summer’s progress.
Periwinkle lupine.
Fuschia fireweed.
Yet, to Pretty Ann I confess,
I am a poppy fan who favors
my neighbor’s
blue.
Susan Slocum Dyer
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