Dark Sky Country
by Patricia Farrell
It’s been almost a year to the day since my friend died on the summer solstice. I’ve been wearing one of his old T-shirts all week. It’s the one with a picture of Frenchglen, that outpost of a town in southeast Oregon, near the Malheur wildlife refuge. Remember? Where the Bundy’s staged their government protest. Dave probably got the shirt in the tiny town after visiting the refuge or maybe Steens Mountain, famous for mustangs and wildflowers. It’s dark sky country out there. Stars are brighter when the sky is blacker.
Yesterday the junk man came and took away thirty years of accumulation. Odds and ends, so many pieces of wood, old doors, broken fans and rusted metal. Saved because who knows what you might need when you move out to the country. My job was to break down old cardboard boxes. Or put treasures out by the road, next to the FREE sign. I hear people slow down, stop, open, close doors. Each day the pile gets smaller until only one door remains. When a door is off its hinges, it is neither open nor closed.
It’s been a week of protest, another week of violence. Sly Stone and Brian Wilson died. Sly loved everyday people and Brian preferred his room to fun in the sun. Overnight the beans have pushed out and unfurled their leaves, casting off their shells. There was a full moon last night – the Strawberry moon. I walked out in the glow, my shadow preceding me, to gaze at the silvery corn seedlings. Another solstice come and gone. Forces are gathering all around.
Patricia Farrell lives in rural western Oregon. Formerly a biologist and landscape architect, she completed the Certificate of Creative Writing program from Linfield University in 2021. Her poems have been published in journals such as Camas Literary Journal, Verseweavers, The Clackamas Literary Review, Cirque, and Stone Poetry Quarterly, among others.