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Image scavenged by author

Crossing the Santiam River on my way to
see my mother, I saw the wide dark wing
and squinted against the eastern sun: white
head, it was an eagle, one old enough to
echo the snow on Seekseekqua. It cast its
gliding loops alone. I marked it in memory,
hadn’t seen one there before (or maybe I
hadn’t noticed, watching as I did for trucks 
rumbling out from the rest stop onto I-5 and
giving them room to merge—further south
was where I’d often see eagles paired up,
rising on warm updrafts over the freeway.)
And then those pastures, tourmaline green
dotted with hundreds of lambs. The eagles 
scavenging afterbirth during lambing season, 
filling the whole round world with auguries.

Photo of Corydalis solida “Beth Evans” from the author’s garden

One single name stuck at the end of the binomial,
memento mori for a botanist and their dedication to
certain qualities of the plant: a marble bust set on
a plinth. The plinth has its say, though—irrupting
through pollen blown or carried in, stigma swelling
into seed, seedpod bursting out laughing as it sheds
its appended name, refusing to breed true. I bought
it on impulse, Corydalis solida “Beth Evans”—so
pink!—knowing my friend Beth would smile at how
her namesake shows me early every spring the way
life comes and comes again despite Beth being years
dead. Both of us content that the cultivar name will be
lost, shaken loose, once the bees visit my garden.