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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…
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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.
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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…
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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…
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Here we are,my head rocked back,your hands gently unfolded,soft and creped, andlit by the sunlike paper lanterns. Here we are,combing spider websfrom our hair,like strings of silt,like the baleen of whales. Here we are,watching the osprey drift,wings rocking like the mast of a ship,our own feet sweetly stuck here,bathed in earth, in moss, in…
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Tree spark,watching the red-winged blackbirdsail to the east,its warbling song like a raven I once heard in the desert.Tree spark,do you see me? Holding my hands up to you,stringing down your spirit the way rain falls into a river,the way moonlight falls in cupped palmsand is drunklike springwater?
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Oak treesspread like coral inthe long danceas the crowswatch the edges, as theypaint shadowsover the riverwith their wings,and perch on branches sponged with lichen,calling the sun forthto their feathers.
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River lighttuned to the sunstretchedlike pieces of spider silk, white over the blue shallow waterand glacial pools,the stones unraveled and caught in the duck’s beak,the heron,the osprey,the scrape of wings,the lines on the water,the intersection of bug and currentand fallen alder leavestumbling the waysnow catches on a hill,pumping along the threadthat ties mountain to…
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Half-light,pulled close around the ferns,as I wade through dusk swamps of ivy,walking, rushing,swatting lace-webbed kingdomsdrawn between cedar tendrils, down to the base of the creek,the silver rush of mud and fallen leaveswhere the owl watches,her wings two striped archesunfolding silently into the air,an arrow bound for the soil,for the slick white back,wet with dew,of…
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We chased the sun, its red hulked glow dipping into the mountains,the river running high, and overcast,spanning out at the place where the hills drift apart, and we caught the sun, up on the dark curve of a hill, over a field grown feral with winter stalks of queen-anne’s-lace, just as the clouds burned…