Poetry

The Columbia Gorge


It takes courage to confront beauty
at its own level. Panoramas
are domains of past or future,
not the present; beauty for spectators,
distant and safe.

The scenic highway cuts high into the cliffs
as the river did an eon ago,
and beauty lies beyond and below.
Parallel to the Columbia, at sea-level runs I-84.
Twin channels, un-identical
one fluid, the other firm.

Traveling east from Portland
trees separate the twins until,
at the first clearing,
the river slides into view like a crosscut saw.

At sixty-miles an hour I collide head on -
gut-level with the gorge,
and by beauty I am severed at the waist.

Loretta Dryden Fischer