TREE OF SAWS
a poem cycle
by Lee Patton

ABALONE LIMIT

We stroll just inland from Glass Beach 
through the portal-like  passage 
where the logging road bridge
was dismantled–just the sky overhead 
now, not log-laden, honking trucks.
Our next-door neighbor honks at us.
He shows off abalone shells arrayed
across his wetsuit, splayed on his pickup’s
seat like a flattened passenger.
“Got my limit. I’ll take these home 
and give a couple to your folks.”

As he sputters away, my head’s as full
of hungry memory as our back porch sink
when my brother came home shivering
from diving near the old dump’s
cove.  Loaded with his limit,
he’d dunk the squirming mollusks
into the basin, their single-muscle
selves stuck to the smooth porcelain
as if still clinging to their tidal life,
clueless that our back sink was only
a holding tank, a prelude to slaughter,
that my father was about to flatten
their flesh with a tenderizing hammer.

ARTS PATRON IN THE GRAVEL YARD

“I am a patron of the arts,”
my brother claims as we scramble 
through his buddy’s gravel yard.
It stashes his cache, long, rusty saws 
among discarded lumber. My brother 
likes to browse the lot, hold a blade 
close to his almost sightless eyes
and caress each rusted tooth.

He’s hired an artist to sculpt the blades
into the idea of a giant redwood.
Each sawtooth edge will form 
the trunk’s vertical line, a tree of saws 
to glorify his seaside shopping center.

I squint into a thin fogbank 
which blurs the green-black, jagged
horizon of redwood hilltops. “So,”
I ask, “Have you commissioned another
saw-tree for the Wal-Mart you’re building
across the highway, on the ocean side?”

 “Naw, that store’s just business.” 
He shakes a blade so it sings down to me.
“This tree of saws…it’s art,” he says,
enraptured by the music
in the metal teeth.

DISMANTLING HELL AT THE OLD DUMP

We swerved toward the sea bluffs
laughing about when this park was the dump
and we’d be stashed in back of Dad’s pickup—
itself a candidate for the scrap-heap—
hunkered among the week’s trash
as if we ourselves were candidates
for expulsion over those slimy,
guano-topped rocks. 

Tidied in the hands of wary heirs,
the beach of broken glass, of beer-bottle 
ambers and sea-greens, rough edges
soothed by twenty thousand tides,
has smoothed into local attraction,
“Glass Beach,” where tourists 
rove barefoot over a crust of shards—
our parents’ and grandparents’ discards
too worthless for the penny deposit. 

 As if in crusty mockery,
twisted, rusted almost through,
stubborn fingers of scrap metal
stretch like old men’s claws
from the tops of sea rocks. Fat seals
doze on the lower ledges. Today,
locals yammer about the seals
“taking over”—transmitted on talk-show
feeding-frenzies of fact-free disdain, callers
equate “environmental law” with Satan.  

But Hell was actually dismantled here 
when the eternal trash fires were doused
among smoldering rags and cat carcasses
jumbled down bluffs to trash tides
of shoe-polish tins and condoms, seasoned
by a fresh stream of raw sewage, puked
airborne into the Pacific like talk-radio spew,
the shuck of unpolished families
who didn’t know from Shinola
not to defile our home.

NEW HOUSE AT THE OLD DUMPE

“I notice they didn’t name this The Dump,”
my younger brother says.  Our walk wanders 
past the eroding logging road and into empty
asphalt streets planted with lots FOR SALE,
platted between the old town dump
and flat land where the mill used to be.
“No, it had to be Glass Beach Pointe,”
he embellishes, sounding out the extra “e.”
Then my brother spots the lot where
his school friend’s building her house
comically close to a gravel heap.

Stealing up the pile, I peer like a pirate
at a vacant patch of the lumberyard
where our uncles operated forklifts
thirty years ago, their tall pincers
toy-like in the acres of stacked redwood.
Other than impressions of old pallets
in the yellow grass, you’d never know
a kingdom of salmon-pink heartwood
had vanished, unreachable as El Dorado.

WONDERLAND

Behind mounds of sky-gray gravel
squeezed by wild blackberry vines, 
slow, sure, my aunt’s rented house
implodes, empty, its front porch
slapped by the Shoreline Highway.
In a few years, it’ll be another pile—
brittle lumber, shattered glass, shingles—
its collapse a last resound for all the laughs,
squeals, hollers, and screams it housed.

 At five, I led my younger cousins
behind that house, across sea bluffs
to Wonderland—cliffside stalactites, 
fresh-poured palaces in tidal caves
of clotted concrete.  Wonderland spread
its empire when the gravel yard dumped
excess Redi-Mix down embankments.
The Pacific spit salt froth at our sneakers—
we tread tide slime across poured cement.

Years later my aunt gasped to realize,
“If I knew you kids were playing there,
I would’ve died.” She thought Wonderland
was our fantasy, not that solidifying dump
ninety degrees above Dead Man’s Cove
where ooze immobilized above the shore.
(I’m not sure she told me this before or after
her husband ended a drunken fight 
by pitching her off the second floor.)

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