Jennifer Bullis

Our Lady of Lost Items

 

Lady, where did you go, wherever were you, ever? I’m losing things in twos: two pairs of things, and twice now, you. Yesterday I hid my hiking poles behind a wide fir trunk to retrieve on my way down, just uphill of where rain had slicked the steep trail’s clay soil.

Walking on, I was happy from seeing crows in the treetops, tiny wrens flitting amid ferns, three trumpeter swans overhead muscling their graceful bodies into the wind. Ascending through dense tree-farmed firs leading up to the clear cut, I was surprised to find oak leaves on the trail: out-of-place, perplexing here, in the Cascade foothills. A few acorn-colored leaves still clung to the top branch-tips. Choosing two from the ground to carry home, I tucked them between fallen branches to grab on my way back and spare them            pocket-damage.

On my return, they were gone—probably not taken or blown away, just camouflaged amid papery bigleaf maple and rain-rotted alder leaves. I searched a while, then heeded daylight’s waning and headed down, turned off the trail to retrieve my hiking poles from behind the fir above the treacherous descent, and discovered them missing. You, too, Lady, double-disappeared, once from history, and again from my view these recent years, nearly past finding amid virus and damaging lies and doom-thought and dread.

Today I went up into those hills again with a paper sign I made that said, “Did you take my hiking poles from behind this tree on Thursday? I want them back! Please call.” I stapled my sign to the fir trunk’s front and hid the stapler behind it while I continued my hike. I hoped the stapler would be there when I got back, and it was. Meantime, I was happy from revisiting the oak tree higher uphill, gazing again at its lobed, green-hued, saddle-tan leaves on the ground and against the sky. Tempted to take another two with me, I stopped myself, considering yesterday’s paired disappearances.

Instead I laid several oak leaves against the dark soil, arranged them in a radial pattern, took a photo, named it Framework for Asking a Blessing. O Lady, forgive us our clear-cutting, our bloodletting, our egregious forgetting. Teach me again, please: who is it listening when I thank or call out for a deity? Is that one you? And who is it loosely attempting to prevent us from slipping over the steep edge of loss? Who holds us, who fastens, with many clasps, each thing to another?

 

 

Taking Down the Douglas Fir

 

My aunt once told me I could survive any loss
by saying a litany of three consolations.
So: Dickinson, Annie Dillard, Suzanne Simard—
here I must digress to tell you about my recent problem
with focus. Grief-fatigue. Fight-or-flee
cortisol bathing the cerebrum. Fragmented

attention. All morning I listen to the limbing:
buzz and crash in our front yard as the arborist
slowly ascends with his saw. After lunch,
he climbs eighty feet again,
starts from the top to cut the trunk.
Six-foot lengths thud down onto lawn.

Used to be, I’d immerse in, say, War and Peace
just to enjoy being held for months in narrative
thrall—and to crave, in completing the book,
release. These days, I can barely make it to the end
of a news article, let alone a longform read. How long
before I find myself unable to finish a flash essay,

or haiku? Beetles, the arborist confirmed, and before that
the heat dome and drought, and before that our neighbor’s
cuts into the slope to build a retaining wall,
severing roots. Before all those causes,
our neighbor’s insistence on taking out
the companion fir spanning the property line.

Let’s redirect to consolations: Solnit, Washuta, Febos.
Caring for a gregarious horse, seeing goldfinches
sip from the fountain on our deck, hummingbird perched
on a stem of rose. And all this week, spotting Perseids—
bright rewards for patience and sustained attention
to the sky. Reading up, too, about the meteor shower

diverts and consoles: learning those darts of light
are atmosphere-burned ejecta of the comet Swift-Tuttle,
that they emanate from Perseus, the constellation outshone
by Cassiopeia, adjacent W of stars. A constellation map
teaches me another neighbor of Perseus is named
Camelopardalis. Spotted camel! Great consolation,

this whimsical misnomer for giraffe. The star diagram
shows its elongated neck, longest of all the artiodactylae.
Solace throughout this order of terrestrial two-toed ungulates:
llamas, antelopes, Bactrian camels. Solace, also,
in the words of stricken, hope-filled poets of wonder:
Nezhukumatathil, Katherine May, Ross Gay.

In a book I managed to half-finish, Simard details
how Douglas firs share water and nutrients
through mycelial networks connecting their roots.
Could we have saved our tree, or was it doomed by the death
of its invisibly entangled companion? Is there a retroactive ritual
to protect against neglect and bad decisions? For over a year,

our fir tried to warn us, orange needles swirling down with every
change of wind. All night, I dream of celestial bodies cast
like seeds: a comet’s frozen mass yielding gradually to the heat
and greater gravity of the sun. Its combusting particles
no bigger than sand, the brief luminosities of its unappearing
streak toward earth.

 

 

 

 

Jennifer Bullis is the author of Impossible Lessons (MoonPath Press) and of poems and essays appearing in Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Lake Effect, Terrain.org, and Water~Stone Review. She is an Artsmith Residency Fellow, recipient of honorable mention for the Gulf Coast Prize, and finalist for the Brittingham & Pollak and Wheelbarrow Books Prizes. She holds a Ph.D. from University of California-Davis and lives in Bellingham, Washington, where she writes about long-distance foot travel, horse-keeping, deforestation, repurposing myth, and women in the courtroom.