Gray and Green

Portland is gray and green.
I have no doubt that Oregonians
will not agree with me
so, as a desert-dry visitor
born in Tacoma--Who is he to talk?--
let me be quick to say that
Portland is, at the same time,
a most alluring city.

The people of Portland have created
bakery-warm neighborhoods,
deliberately snuggling people together
on small, old streets with short blocks,
making a thousand neighborhood corners
for small shops and wood-fired ovens
where proximity means you necessarily engage
the people around you.

So I dare to say, at the same time,
that the sky is gray,
and that even a 21st century visitor can say
that the waters above the firmament
regularly rain down, and that
the waters under the firmament
tend to lie about before they ooze down
and around and back again.

And the green of Portland is not simply

the green of its evergreen trees,
but as much the green of moss
sometimes rooted in concrete, taking nourishment
from the juices of the rain going by and down.

I am sure it is coincidental
but I cannot remember ever
not seeing a gray sky at the airport.
The Pacific Ocean is just over the hill
a manageable drive away,
with the mighty Columbia River
serving as a kind of funnel,
an enticement for every kind of water,
a promise that there is water inland, and up-river, too.

Then, and now, still,
a huge river of Arctic air
is sweeping inland and across America,
colliding with, and colluding with
even wetter air from the Gulf,
half drowning the continent from
Texas to the Upper Midwest.

We did see, on our side of the plane,
a mountain, but else it was a bed of clouds,
unbroken except for small flaws in their design
until we reached Nevada and the Colorado River basin.

Mostly, what we saw was
the plane itself,  oddly quiet,
earnest in its race with weather.

Even the Sonora Desert
was cold, grazed by gray.