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Fallow
All of this—these windowless warehouses, these factories made, seemingly, of styrofoam; these used-car prairies that glare pink in the sunset. All of this used to be fields. Just ten years ago there was a cabin, there, made of rain-darkened wood, roof caving in, half rotten, clung over with moss, and there was a wagon…
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Far-Fallen Wind
Night wind warmed by the creekside, its water running plump above milky stones, and a cedar branch brushed low by the day’s rain, its bristled fingers braided into shadow, tall as the ferns as the snowberry as the quilted sky, brown in its cloudlight and seaweed-blue between, the water perfectly silent against the far-fallen…
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And Still
And still the owls find the low evening, their voices tangled in leaf litter and fog, and still the jays crackle wild-disguised as red-tails as hawks, and still the raccoons pig-snarl, their paws caked with dirt and blood, and still the cedar trees shiver, silver-eyed, ghostly against the setting sun.
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Sea Lions
The sea lions bellow, their grumbles percussive behind the basalt towers and gull-stained wind, behind the open space cupped against your ears and the sand gritted into your mouth there they are, the sea lions barking like bears.
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Beginning of Time
Maybe we can still remember the closed-in darkness long ago before we had eyes, and maybe we can remember the sensation of the jolting waters, thick with calcite and aluminum dust, the shallow ocean clicking against our keratin bodies, the dull, brainless consciousness softened into us, our lives dark and endless among the lacy…
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What The World Once Was
This is what the world once was, low wind across dimpled grasslands, a warm, bruised sweep musked with far-pressed rain, gall oaks whistling as air falls through them. This is what the world once was, a far, clear view, long to the east, to the blue shoulders of the Gorge, the river tucked there,…
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Shoulders of the Sun
It is early night. One side of the sky is bleached but halted, waiting for the rose-gold light to reach it, to slowly catch the edges of the kindling, the fibers curdled to a red so dark they are purple; a coagulated flame that simmers low, held steady on the shoulders of the sun.
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Ocean
Within the movement, the lifting and falling the wind’s low tremble, the waves are sculpted, patted, stretched, flattened to the long, sprawling curve of the earth, and if you look far enough you can see the stillness, the place where the water plunges to an impossible blue so dark it fades into itself, that…
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Great Blue Heron
You there,scraping through the salmonberry leaves, slow-footed in the chutes of terraced clay, your eyes yellow, and seemingly lidless, the kind of eyes that belong to fish or reptiles. You walk, each step halting, perched, one leg lifted, talons stretched like spider-web, like an octopus wrapping its cloth body over a fish, parachute-like, the…
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The God of the River
The river is opaque and fogged-over like sea glass unpierced by even the sharpest sunlight, its layers amorphous clouds of sediment and algae, almost brown, almost green, almost orange at the edges, slipping past you in the way of wind, catching on logs long buried, their arms reaching and rough and barnacled, their arthritic…