Juneau's Saturday February Face
My personal view of Alaska
is a tank farm, and the Alaska Marine Lines’
loading dock—yellow lights,
trucks waiting in the rain.
Do you see how beautiful
this is?
If you take the ferry along
the veins of Southeast Alaska
you’ll see the tank farms first
separating the country
and the small, rain-soaked towns
with their sodium lights.
When February comes down
in clean sheets, when the rest
of the world is packaged
into a morning’s drive with NPR,
then we begin to emerge
as a real place, the way we look
very late on a Saturday night
at the Alaskan, after several drinks,
and just our friends are left.
This is how Juneau looks, now,
from my window. Do you see how
beautiful this is?