Great Blue Heron

The great blue heron is a complex fantastic mystery to me,
More grey than blue, with awkward elongated neck,
Standing in the conical pond like a statue,
Completely motionless, moving nary a muscle.
The pond is grey the colour of a battleship
And stands dark and still on what was once a golf course.
As I stare, the pond turns ever darker and more impenetrable.
The pond is Hardyesque—dangerous pond
In which Eustacia Vye came to the end of her tragic days.
The great blue heron reminds me of a pterodactyl,
Flying through the air of millennia past.
The bird finally stirs, slowly spreads its question wings,
Gradually lifts the weight of its body,
Which rests on skinny pickle wings.
The great blue heron spreads those wings,
And the creature lifts and careens
Toward the cluttered gray skies and
Skims against the low-hanging clouds and
Flies into the reality that sits on me.
It flies on, up—unhurried, unrushed, elegant,
Grotesque, impervious, and beautiful.

Stronghold

I remember like a blazing star the driving to and hiking through Cochise Stronghold in
          southeastern Arizona, driving down a woebegone gravel bumpy road that
          appeared to collide with the Dragoon Mountains but the turned left and dove
          deeper.

Into the Stronghold, which as the name says was where in the mid-1800s was where the chief
         Cochise the Chiricahua Apaches lived and defied the U.S. government and
         the U.S. cavalry.

The hiking trail into the Stronghold is rugged but not impossible, climbs steadily and then
          passes magnificent colossal boulders that stand like the ghosts of Apache families.

If you let your imagination run wild, you imagine the boulders running free like the
        spirits of Apache families frozen in time.

The enormous boulders lean against one another, supporting one another, standing tall,
         conjuring apparitions of the past—
A past that was both bucolic and tragic.

Never before have I felt a place so strong, so evocative, so powerful, so spiritual, so all-
        encompassing, so annihilating.

The ghosts of the Chiricahua still inhabit these boulder environs, these rock esplanades,
         still inhabit these precious and mysterious and lost canyons.

Still The People ride their pale horses and wave their mystery baskets from the strands of
         the cacti that line the floor of the canyon.

Still the Spirits of the Chiricahua follow us and surround us as we steadily climb the trail
         to an outlook that reaches all the way to Tombstone.

We pass a dammed-up pool where cattle slake their thirst.

We pass cacti that stand guard like lookouts on the side of the living breathing mountain.

It is a place that is dangerously silent, a place in which spirits and dreams float like
         weapons, their invisibility something palpable.

Lying on night in the Yates’s potent hot tub, we face the eastern wall of the Dragoon
          Mountains that capture the rays of the moon and shine like an enormous
          radioactive wall, shimmering and shaking and seducing our spirits

The moon is resplendent, alive, sly, awake,

Lighting the side of the cliff so that the infinite rocks glow, shine with extraordinary and
        mystical brightness, as if the boulders themselves burned with an internal light.

And we, gazing, captivated by the cliff, and the glaring mystic-rock, know that the inner
         light of past is glaring at us through the eyes of Cochise.

Christopher Johnson is a writer based in the Chicago area. He’s done a lot of different stuff in his life. He’s been a merchant seaman, a high school English teacher, a corporate communications writer, a textbook editor, an educational consultant, and a free-lance writer. He’s published short stories, articles, and essays in The Progressive, Snowy Egret, Earth Island Journal, Chicago Wilderness, American Forests, Chicago Life, Across the Margin, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Blue Lake Review, The Literary Yard, Scarlet Leaf Review, Spillwords Press, Fiction on the Web, Sweet Tree Review, and other journals and magazines. In 2006, the University of New Hampshire Press published his first book, This Grand and Magnificent Place: The Wilderness Heritage of the White Mountains. His second book, which he co-authored with a prominent New Hampshire forester named David Govatski, was Forests for the People: The Story of America’s Eastern National Forests, published by Island Press in 2013.

You can find more of Christopher’s work here on Ink Pantry.