Counting on Wildflowers
The dusky light begins to turn golden. The forest gives way to barren hills covered in blowdown and snags. Some of the blowdown curves over the hills, looking like stilled waves of gray Saragossa grass. There is hardly any color anywhere, just the bleached bone starkness of the tree skeletons. I cannot stop looking at them, still standing after all these years, bare naked, for everyone to see. I cannot photograph them. It would be like taking pictures of the dead in their coffins.
So Kim Antieau observes the sun rising on Mt. St. Helens at the summer solstice, 2002. In poems illustrated by Terri Windling, in an original short story set in West Africa, in essays ranging in subject matter from Daphne du Maurier's fiction to excursions in the Gifford-Pichot National Forest, Antieau illuminates the richness of our world today, reveling in its wonders, worrying over its degradation, seeking out the possibility of transmutation with proportion distilled by reflection and a ready dash of humor.
Contents:
- Rose Red & Snow White (poem)
- Breathing in the Vapors
- Catastrophe
- A Strange Attractor (short story)
- Soul Food
- Light
- Coyote, Chinook Salmon, and Snake
- Swan Maidens (fictional essay)
- Transmutation
- Counting on Wildflowers
- Coyote Whispers
- Wings (poem)