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| Crooked River winding through Smith Rock State Park, Central Oregon. Photo by Molly |
Ode to Lady Topofilia, An Oregon Love Poem
By Will Hornyak
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love your hot rugged rocky curvaceous
Crooked River Canyon country
I swoon at the scent of your
high desert Owyhee sagebrush perfume
your John Day River country juniper
pungent summer Ochoco Mountain pine sap
but there is nothing more intoxicating than the scent
Ode to Lady Topofilia, An Oregon Love Poem
of your springtime Willamette Valley lilac
planted deep in dark silty alluvial soils.
Oh but Lady Topofilia I love as well
the odiferous aromas you wear at low tide
beneath dark Columbia River wharves at Astoria
where mammoth sea lions sprawl over themselves
like drunken sailors on slimy kelp-strewn
barnacled blocks of rip-rap barking howling
singing off-key as black storm clouds
wind-whipped winter rains deadly ocean swells
keep fisherman and sailors anchored safely
in Warrenton barrooms shooting pool swapping lies
over shots and beers.
Lady Topofilia when I roam far from my Milwaukie home
birthplace of the Bing Cherry
where Kellog and Johnson Creeks
meet the mighty Willamette
I am not truly home until I have made my pilgrimage
to your shore breathed in again your heady brew
of rotten Cottonwood leaf mulch goose poop mud
silt-laden Willamette waters
not until the Great Blue heron
has scolded me rrraakk rrraakk rrrakk
as I intrude once again upon its solitude
and send it winging ponderously upriver
towards Willamette Falls where monstrous sturgeon
still swim in those waters where Clackamas villagers
fished grew plump on eel steelhead and salmon
for four thousand years.
But Lady Topofilia who can forget the nights?
Oh the nights!
When silver moonlight gleamed
upon your buxom black columnar basalt outcroppings
and far below your Deschutes river waters whispered to me
murmured lapped then thundered ecstatic
through Whitehorse Buckskin Mary Wapinitia rapids
surging through rolling Moro and Sherman County hills
cloaked in your gown of winter wheat.
Lady Topofilia I admire how generously easily
your Columbia River hefts conveys
tug boats massive wheat-and-potato-laden barges
fishing boats sailboats sailboards on bright waters above
and how below your dark currents still remember
trace caress that vast maze
of volcanic basalt river channels and chutes
mother lode of Chinook and Coho runs
Celilo Falls
Buried beneath still waters
where your voice sang for millenia in a hundred choirs
of free flowing cataracts and waterfalls
and joined with songs of
Cayuse Chinook Nez Perce Tenino Umatilla Yakima
And more and more and more for millennia.
Lady Topofilia
You are ancient storied and ever new
From your fertile womb of Tillamook tidelands
To sunburnt Steens lush Blue Mountains Alvord Desert
sands
Remote Imnaha Basque Rome
To South Wind at Port Orford
Pastoral Sweet Home
You are the Dew lipped Spring maiden ripe Summer fruit
Wise Autumn crone wild screeching Winter hag.
I am your love slave gigolo
most ardent admirer
Queen of My Heart Goddess Muse of my soul
For you my love never ever tires.
@Will Hornyak
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| Sheep Rock, John Day Fossil Beds, Eastern Oregon. Photo by Molly |
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| Fort Rock, where 9,000 year old sandals have been found, Eastern Oregon. Photo by Molly |