Poems by Louhi Pohjola
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A Magus in the Sand
-after Gerald Stern
by Louhi Pohjola
From Canary Spring 2025
Louhi lives in the Johnson Creek Watershed near the Willamette River, the former home of the Clackamas Indians, Chinookan speakers who lived in the Columbia River Valley. Mt. Hood is visible on clear days, but her presence is felt even on the rainiest of days.
What I took to be the bleached scapula of a whale
turned out to be the door of a plane nesting
in between the cleavage of sand dunes.
What I took to be an orb of quartz
turned out to be a doll’s severed head
imprisoned in gray, unearthly light.
What I took to be driftwood
turned out to be soap dispenser bottles,
milk cartons, and buoys, pallid and bloated.
What I took to be a gannet’s orchid-shaped bone
turned out to be plastic pansies peeping beneath a shell.
What I took to be an Eden was an abandoned home.
What I took were the scapula, quartz, driftwood,
and gannet’s bone, that death or weather had transformed.
© Louhi Pohjola
In My Dream, Costello the Octopus Has a Nightmare
by Louhi Pohjola
Costello dreams of the sea in his small tank, changes
skin color, inks a potent stream. He dreams he is Proteus,
old man of the sea, truth-sayer, shape-shifter,
who foresees the approaching tidal wave of heat.
Costello-Proteus shouts for Baku, that wily dreamcatcher,
to come to his aid. For his dream is now nightmare:
Chinese bats, Australian parrots, European rabbits, and mice
shape-shift to grow larger wings, bills, ears, and tails.
Gigantic forms float in his brain as the blood of those
enlarged appendages disperses heat through molten air.
Costello-Proteus sees the shape-shifting giants born
of this heat rise up to parry with the gods.
His nine brains jolt signals to his tentacles. The maelstrom subsides
in a bodily embrace and his weeping: Baku-san, come eat my dream!
Costello-Proteus pleads to Baku, devourer of nightmares,
to let the giants pass. Uncage him, to warn of coming tides.
© Louhi Pohjola
Ode to Bigelow 224
by Louhi Pohjola
Bigelow 224, how you shot
up in 200 years, from spindly sprout
to massive pine on sky island
and laid down your golden earlywood
and then your latewood high
above saguaro and gangly ocotillo cacti.
Year after year in your
commitment to careful growth,
you wrote your ringed texts
in an ancient language: a long
memoir of a life that saw
men land on the moon
among other strange things.
O! The power of tree rings!
Yet, your latest is barely
a dozen cells wide.
And what a tale it tells
in a new dialect, of scorching
heat, parching drought,
an escalating toll of skimpy
canopies of rust-brown needles,
a cambium that can no longer
make rings of tiny cells.
A warning written in wood.
© Louhi Pohjola