–Sandy Brown Jensen
(This poem is about my unusual muse, who is a ten foot tall hominid who survived the Ice Age and still roams the Pacific Northwest. She is not to be confused with Sasquatch of urban legend fame or Dzonoquah of the sacred Kwakwakawak tribal pantheon except that in Dreamtime, she is both of those. I am working on a book of poems called Giantess.)
Will she come to me now when
the little creek of grief is nothing
but dark water in an old ditch
inching upward with the swell
of winter rain?
She is a creature
of the far North. All winter
She sleeps as the bears sleep.
She lets her dream body loose
to roam, held to her sleeping
bulk by the thinnest of silks.
When the winter nights
are tin cold and the stars
so far away that I may as well
have my head in a bucket
punched with holes, I look
for her between fir trees. I listen
for her in the gunshot snap
of a frozen limb. I try
to find her thread
and lead her to me here.
Now the March thaw
is breaking up the rivers
the way, long after a death,
the heart begins to rise again.
I know she is traveling
toward me now, the long
southward beaches still roaring
with open mouths their storm
surge songs.
She is finding
cockles among the seaweed,
and her eyes, if you could see them,
have twin catchlights
like inverted crescent moons.
