December DiaryA Poem by Michael Sun Bear As a young man, with new girlfriend in tow, I participated in an eagle watching float trip on the upper Skagit.
The winter of ‘75
Found me footloose Fresh off a tour with Indian Health Where I endured life upon that spit of rock Imprisoning home of the Makah Perched atop the bow of the Lower Forty Eight Jutting into the North Pacific That mad mother of wailing winter storms Witching up twenty-five foot waves Singing winds to a hundred miles per hour Known to steal sanity And blow decrepit aluminum homes To Kingdom Come Thus it was I possessed a down parka And finely crafted mountain boots Purchased from the Eddie Bauer shop In its last dying days as an expedition outfitter Born there near Seattle’s docks Crazed jumping off point for The Klondike Gold Rush These I wore that December Married to LL Bean lined jeans, Raccoon skin gloves, double flannel shirts, And the ubiquitous wool boot socks Of my childhood I wore it all that morning To the Rockport Bridge rendezvous Where we left our cars Climbed into crowded vans Which toted us deeper into The ice and snow laden Cascades Deeper into morning shadow Hiding little Marblemount Hot coffee was served with Cool calming words for the nervous We then launched our inflatables Upon the swirling skirts of The beautiful Skagit River Seized by mercurial currents We drifted dreaming Toward the distant Salish Sea The thrashing tails of stragglers Threw skyward Small arcs of sunny spray to Chart our downstream travel A humble reversal to the earlier migration Of thousands of spawning salmon Now in death A shawl for the river’s shoulders A meandering muffler Of shining rot Sometimes thick upon miles of riverbank Onward we drifted Here, there, rounding a bend To find a banner of low fog Stretched bank to bank Much like the drift nets Used for centuries by the Upper Skagit people A silvered moon hung Above the mists We drifted on Wandered the ancient sanctuary For a thousand years Home to wintering majesty Every bare cottonwood limb a Rosary of resting eagles In their white hoods Hundreds in all, bellies filled Here and there a dark head A healthy number of juveniles Ignoring our guide Who with Viking arm and one long oar Navigated from the stern Awestruck We spun our heads ‘round and ‘round We could have been mistaken for Owls watching eagles No heated luxury rafts were Piloted through those early years Bone aching after two hours We washed up on a rocky peninsula Where a hearty fire held its head high It too twirled and spun To take in every wonder of that morning Hot coffee, hot soup Excited conversations rose as steam Into that frigid air For in the night A vast Mississippi of Arctic weather Had poured south across the border An impatient tailor knitting our morning Sun tore from the river The last rags of fog We craned our vision up To the blueing sky Sketch pad for two eagles Circling, circling on thermals In feathered calligraphy One final hour on the river Broke apart our little hearts Which each and all proved too small To house all the vast wonders of that day I bow to Creator © 2026 Michael Sun BearReviews
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9 Reviews  Last Updated on March 3, 2026 Author
Michael Sun BearShoreline, WAAboutOnce upon a time, a crazy, talented poet from across the Salish Sea told me of an intense dream she experienced in which she was given a strange title for a poem, but nothing more. She felt it import.. more.. |
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