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I walk through the foreston a drifting afternoon, and the near-solstice lightcuts through the ferns, painting them gold, painting the air silver,and I stop to listen to the single warble of a hummingbird,and to breathethe sun-touched air, when all at once the trees sway,the tilting dance, the pre-wind brush back,before the gust rolls through,and…
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There is a cedar treewho I visit on each hike,and when it rains,the water hangsin its fine-woven branches,as though in a spider web–in small, clear globes,that reflect dark green fog,and licorice fern,and youth-on-age, and my own face, too, and the water running heavy through the creek,and the little brown birds jumping from one branch…
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The clouds cling to the hillside,worn pink-redby the growing storm and the softness of sunset,and behind me the mountain hides beneath the riverin the sharp light of early duskin the clear, swirling air,as the first drops of rain drum and join the water.
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I feel the moon behind the skyand I hear the ocean,the click of fish, the soft, curling strings of sunlight caught up in the salt-veils,and I feelthe pulse of waves,smoothed by wind, one by one against the shore, as I float on my back, the moon’s oceanthe dark spots,the mares, the old seasmade of…
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I went on a fall hike today to celebrate Halloween–the halfway point between fall and winter–and I was inspired to write this poem.
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When I was a child, my grandmother gifted mea small replica of the stone used to grind corn into masa,and I have it on my kitchen shelf, even now, next to my mortar and pestle.At my parent’s house, there’s a big one, a real one, the name for which I have been told by…
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The maples and horse-chestnuts soften, their casted shadowstorn from the sun,cracked open by golden smoke,the sun painted,not long ago, like a strange, eclipsed moon, or the eye of some god,too fierce to look upon from our small earth.
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White dark and a hummingbird pressed into juniper,a ghost-god,wings unseen,and, hours later,a hawk, tail stripes larger than a planet’s rings,and, at dusk, a family of robinsbathed in the pink mottle,their sun kept in a drawer and cotton ball muffled,and a batflying above them.
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Sometimes I think I would rather live in the dream. As they sit by the fire, holding beer cups in their gloved hands, their mouths rippling with laughter, I press my back to the dying warmth, the last glow of sun, bled into rock, and, through the cold air above my sleeping bag, I…
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The salt-worn trees and their terraced arms white as bone, as cartilage, twined into rope and laced like string between cloud and earth. Wind blows through, caught in the late-light shadows, the teeth of baleen whales, gusts of seawater and krill, sea-wind and spring mosquitos, the ocean giving each footstep to the ferns, a…