The wind parts the leaves like a hand brushing back a curtain, yellow and diaphanous in the low tide of the sun. There they are, the Ash and cottonwood, the young maple, long bands of light tethered in the furrows of their bark. Their leaves are coaxed loose, and they fallas slow as particles…
The cedar tree holds up the night, its branches the dark blue of early dawn in those pre-pink momentswhere it is neither night or day,and behind it the mountain sleeps in shadowlike some deep-sea giant peeking through gold curtains of silt and seaweed, the wind carving against it, onto the backs of birds and…
I know two trees that are woven together, fiber by fiber, root by root, braided together after countless days, and moments, and centuries, holding onto each other, their branches shimmering together in every wind. Their canopies are a tapestry, their roots indistinguishable from one another, like a basket holding the world in, tucked into…
You stand under the big leaf maples, in the same place where, months earlier, you watched threads of sunlight weave between branches, catching on threads of spider-web, everything floating and filmy and lit by the sun. Today, the sky is cut-through, opened, revealing itself for the first time in a year, and you notice…
Moonlight caught up in all the layers of the atmosphere and filtered by glass, colorless, resting on the backs of my hands. We once would have been out in this moonlight, bathing in it, our eyes adjusted to the dark, our hands warmed by fires, and I feel nostalgic for those moments that my…
It is the time of slanted light,the time of night-songs,when the shadowed ferns bowto the stillness rising from the soil. And all aroundis the smell of sun leaving grass,the treetops turning to rust,the sky running thin,and there is Venus surfacing above the hill,and Queen Anne’s lacetucked within the vines,all of uswatching the pink stripe,…
In the folding horizon,a bare tree,branches like the stiff undersea coralI once found on a Hawaiian beach,dried out, twig-like, sculptedto hold something bigger than it. From far away, the crows look like fruit,perched there,small and ruffled,pressed into themselves,warm feathers in the wind. As I’m watching, a line of geeseflow over, their wings broad and…
It is the time of new green,of samaras jutting rose-pink from pale, fringed flowers;it is the time of milky elderflowersand soft-leaved thimbleberry;it is the time of salmonberry crowns,hairy and ready to bud;it is the time of the robin’s nest beneath the porch,and the chink of hummingbirds brushing past cedars;it is the time of unfurling.
The seas in the moon that sink down, depths darkened and bitter and gray in the distance, mottled by space, by emptiness, by open sky that presses down and forms bruises, deep impressions that glow unbearable in the distance, can you feel it, distance darkened by empty sky, by the movement of birds, by…
I want to ask the sky to guide me to that unfurled shorein the distance;I want to ask the sunto dance with me,the long-willowed dance of my ancestors,the two of us on the slopes of some mountainbelow the suns of other worlds;I want to ask the moonto be my home,wherever I am–great stirrer of…