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Painting the Sky
I am here beneath the rust, painting the soft skies with the tips of my fingers, wedged between river and hill, watching through maple leaves as thin as insect wings, the stained glass through which the wind dries, ochre and purple, behind the cloudlight, and it speaks to me in wildfire smoke and birdsong,…
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Thorns
I walk down to the sand on a deer trail (or perhaps a human one) lined with a wall of blackberry bushes, snagged with spider-webs that hold like glue onto shore pine needles, and escaped petals of some neighbor’s night-blooming jasmine, and there’s a single swath of gray construction matting, frayed at the edges,…
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The Painted Hills
Those bands of red ochre; those black mottled lines grayed down by the wind;they have the matte luster of hand prints on cave walls, where firelight once feathered into aurochs and horses and bison and deer, their bodies rounded bythe dun of crushed shells, painted by peeling skin against porous rock, animal eyes thin-swept…
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Redwoods at Dusk
Sunlight frayed silken curtained through dusk branches, dust twinkling in the way of fireflies, ferns sorrel and huckleberry starts quivering as low-down sunlightslants their leaves with waning warmth and the wind carriesfar-off fogand river smells and the canopy above them turns in the other wind the hidden wind that never reaches the ground.
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The Dance of the Water Ouzel
The sun it dances across the water ouzel’s plain, the dimpled mirror where she catches the green-sunken river in her beak, and carries it, fat with caddisflies and dragonfly nymphs and small, struggling crawdads, her eyes trained to the warm-sun to the cottonwoods to the smooth stone midway through the river where the current…
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Stained Glass Ripples
The mist hangs there a cloud pressed to glass by early afternoon, the water flowing into churn and froth, the river stones chirping against each other as they toss under the force of the waterfall, and on the shore the blackened trunks of old firs catch sun through cloud light still healing from wildfire…
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Canopy Sunlight
How many times have I walked through the forest and never noticed the face in the fallen tree, the lichen draped like brittle hair, the skin made of centuries of mud and fungi long exposed long cracked in the sun, the cheekbones made of desiccated roots, palled by spider-webs the lace reaching down the…
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Snow Clouds
The clouds are threaded with mountain-pink, andthe kind of muted purple that reflects from pondwater as it lies still at the moment of dusk, and the ravens blink the snow away, calling in their Cascade dialects, throaty songsthat catchin the fir needles like sunlight, and the snow falls in patches between the canopy and…
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Rain on the Ocean
The ocean is waiting there, pock marked in the way that dew hangs from jeweled firs, how itmelts the soft snow beneath it, and farther out, the white painted light is made ghostly where the horizon meets it and the white foam fray and the clouds brushed and bruised and half the ocean drawn…
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Moonlight on the Windowsill
I see the moonlight blank against the windowsill sunk into the grains of wood, into the etchings of pencils and pressed fingernails carved like insect-scarred walking sticks we used to find in the forest, and mossy flakes from screen windows open too long in the summer, and they are golden, far too golden, and…