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We are walking in the sun, along the blue-green edges. I stop to hear the grass. Sedges and cattails speak a particular language, rushes another. Grasses are perhaps the most clear, but only when they are tall and seeded with knots of wisp. We listen for some time. We hear a sliding, an endless…
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These prose-poems, narratives, and photographs focus on the various waters I’ve come upon in the last several months. Whether lake or river, at home or traveling, water proved a captivating companion, one that brings to mind sustainability, human experience, and our place among the greater world. Water can serve as the scenic focal point…
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The raven in the Wasatch does not sound like the raven in the Cascades; one is the sound of yellow aspen trees, the other, the sound of fog lifting from the river. They both honk, and so crackle like untended fires, but one is space, and one is movement; one is fields of asters–tall, velvet, yellow, purple–and one is the weight…
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I see them, distant, in the space between buildings, brown and rounded and without snow. They are much like islands, risen high above this glinting sea. They do not turn pink at sunset; the sun, rather, is absorbed by their dense soils, like a dwindling fire, or the dust of embers. At some angles…
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I am the one who glides; where the air has become cold–that is what I call the sky, and I stay below it, among the shadow-birds, and at nightfall we slow, so the wind moves faster than us, a silken pulse that bristles our feathers, that carves away the shadow-birds until they are the…
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There is a certain wind that comes off the water; a wind that smells like rain as it’s drying; peach-colored mist on wood or pavement. Something, yes, remarkably dry, wrapped in all the smoothness of water, like roots beneath the earth, bundled and secret. This wind is new in its ancientness, like it may have lain undiscovered for thousands of…
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The sun lasts until 10 p.m. These are the good days, intrinsically so, because without knowledge of history, without, even, knowledge of the unfoldings of the seasons, these days would be good. We all crave the sun. We’re all linked to it, and we hold it inside ourselves like fireflies. Like the leaves from the…
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Sometimes I wonder what the world would look like if we lifted up the concrete. I mean, what if we ripped out all the roads, and the parking lots, and the driveways leading up to people’s houses? I keep imagining it, crumbling away like that, but I have a hard time imagining what would…
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When I first found the ash tree, I thought of the song we used to sing in my grade school choir. Down yonder green valley, where streamlets meander, when twilight is fading, I pensively rove, or at the bright noontide in solitude wander amid the dark shades of the lonely ash grove. This was…
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When, last, did you hear the song of a hummingbird? It’s a sound that I recognize immediately, and yet, if I try to think of it, right now, in my head, I can’t mimic it exactly. It’s an odd sound. Just the other day I was sitting beneath the maple tree, and I heard it–like metal, like…