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Between Waves
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The cloud sea. Two crows bow to the pink edges. They perch on top of the Douglas firs, where the sun unfolds, seeping through as though salt from the sea. And the clouds move steadily–sloped mountainsides, saturated grey-blue: storms, far hills, still moments between waves.
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Iridescence
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Outside my window, a hummingbird speaks. Its voice is the same as the sunset–the same as the tossing of cedar boughs in the southwest breeze. I know it immediately, before I even see it. And when I look up, the hummingbird is hovering–the sun glinting off its feathers, just like the iridescence of an…
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The Scrub Jay in the Juniper
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A western scrub jay sits in the juniper, the blue scarf down his back the same color as its berries, and he sits and watches his cousins, the crows,fly overhead against the city sky, caught up in dust,and he hears the empty click of a truck, somewhere off in the distance,and the heavy silence…
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The Language of Waterfalls
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It takes a while to learn the language of waterfalls, because each speaks a slightly different dialect, but if you go to the same waterfall again and again, you’ll learn to hear its voice. At first, you’ll find it tucked between maidenhair ferns, as the droplets fall, and then you’ll pick it out of…
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Siouxon Creek
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Last night we camped by a waterfall. Even at midnight you could see it, a pale blue ribbon laced between moon-painted firs. All night we heard its gentle pouring, which by morning had become as smooth to our ears as the lap of the sea. Around the fire, we told stories about the beginning.…
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Chickadee Funeral
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The cottonwoods told me that summer would end soon. I was already nostalgic for it, and for other summers that had passed. Dark clouds gathered over the treeline, warmed by the wind, touched by the grassy smell of late-August, as I made my way up the path, and greeted the false-solomon’s-seal, the ocean spray,…
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The Marshmallow Plant
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Althaea grows best in the warm nights of late-July, when the air is still scented with heat, and the sky lingers blue around the edges; when the night creaks with frogsong, and the wind calls softly, coaxing the flower up, like a star from the darkness, its petals veined like birchbark, shaped just like…
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Sauvie’s Island
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A piece of a sand dollar in the dark gray riverbed, embedded in pebbles hewn as fine as black pepper. Here on the banks of the Columbia, an hour’s drive from the ocean, the water feels like its own gentle coastline, quiet ripples and a steep drop-off, and seagulls that fluff their feathers in…
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Birdless
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The mornings I best remember are those of my elementary school summers. I’d wake up at 7 or 8 am, for no reason but the habit of school lingering into my sleep schedule. I’d have some cereal, and put on jean shorts, and a baggy cotton t-shirt, and black rubber rain boots, and the…
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Sea and Sky
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Blue mountains fade like mist out of the water, reflections of each other, dawn to dawn, the haze of all horizons stretched over them. It seems these mountains are all water, that they are the sea and the sky at once; empty and cloudless yet full of something that is old and living. I…