Sunrise 1/15/24

Spokane, Washington

Photos by Jonathan Potter ⓒ 2024

High Drive's your best bet for viewing the sunrise
In the winter months in old Spokane. The bluffs
Stretch out below you with pines receding down
To the railroad tracks and Hangman Creek, the highway
That goes past pieces of my past,
Spangle and Plaza and the rolling Palouse hills.

This morning I look at the sky above those hills
With changing colors that announce the coming sunrise
And foretell a mostly blue-sky day though past,
Well past, the point of freezing, when winter's bluffs
In the seasonal poker game go down the highway
With all your cash pocketed in the goose down.

The truth is I'm feeling just a bit down
With the winter blues and I wish I could wander the hills
All the way to the border and find a hidden highway
To make my crossing under the warming sunrise
To where we'd have our house up on some bluffs
Overlooking the Gulf of Mexico and boats sailing past.

I wish I could seize ahold of our separate past
And make it connect from here all the way down
To the eternal verities where God or the universe bluffs
Us into thinking there's gold hidden in the hills
When in fact it's beaming down from sunrise to sunrise
And it's under our wheels as we flee, paving the highway.

What I really want is to be driving down that highway
With you riding shotgun, pulling our trailer of the past
Towards the new and long-awaited golden sunrise
Of the mysterious future but filled up and weighed down
With the fullness of our beautiful present, the hills
Of Eastern Washington colliding with heaven's bluffs

Where you and I will accept the morning's bluffs
As the sky becomes an orange highway
With coffee-colored clouds above the green hills
Of the coming spring and the present zooming past.
We'll drive that golden road all the way down
To Pullman and beyond to an as yet unknown sunrise

And I'll hold your sunrise hand as we recall these bluffs,
The arrowleaf balsam down along the winding highway,
Creating our own new past from these memories of the hills.
 

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Screenshot for the sake of the integrity of the line breaks on the small screens:

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