Poetry
OCTOBER 2020Palouse 1
by BRIAN KOHL
This is not a place where landscape halts—
hills pearl onward, uniformly dressed
from wheatgrass feet to wheatgrass-covered crests,
each a drop of water in a wave of salt.
Their ripples froze beneath the Cascade vault
as glaciers disappeared into the West
and wind-by-silted-wind the loess progressed
in rinds of soil blanketing basalt.
But now, roadways cut the steepest slopes
and weekend follows work despite the rain.
The years eroding with their human toll,
we mix our lives with geologic scope,
and like the rows of sedentary grain
we stop here, earthen layers of the whole.
Palouse 2
by BRIAN KOHL
The straw lies cut and combed in rows of blond;
it’s sloped on shoulders, on the backs and laps
of this hill, and the next, and far beyond—
all stubble without trees or mountain caps.
The low, repeating swells of oceanic dirt
are uniform as water, marked with maps
that coyote feet have inked, and voles, alert
to wind and tides among these glacial scraps.
That’s on the surface. Underneath the skin,
the bones of time have turned to rock
and nothing shifts the limbless globe—the thin
veneer of stone, the tick of molten clocks,
as meaningless to straw hair as the snow,
which never thinks of summer as it blows.
Brian Kohl
Brian Kohl lives with his wife, Christy, and four small sons among the wheat fields of the Inland Northwest. He is a writer and editor by trade, and he is an instructor for the Camperdown Writers’ Kiln MFA.