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I hear a train horn in the morning grey. I can so clearly imagine it down by the river. With each reverberation it pushes against the quiet, the rippled river, all the way out to the mouth of the ocean, and the coarse interior mountains at the end of the Columbia, the Snake, the…
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Once, in the middle of the night, I heard a squeak from the building across the street, some rumbling of the air conditioning or something, and I thought it was a bird, some exotic nighthawk on the roof, something beautiful, with eyes like smooth black stones, and a scarf of white around his neck.…
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Listen, I will speak their names– larkspur, trillium, stream violet, fairy lantern, vetch, vanilla leaf. I look out into the green and read their leaves, like language, like words on a page. I hear them speak, and know their songs, how the wind rustles them, how the pathfinder-plant flickers green and white, how the sedge…
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Fairy terns fly out to sea each dawn. White-winged and delicate, they travel in small caravans, drifting softly above the waves and white-caps. All day, they relish the sweet sun on their backs, and the fine salt spray on their bellies, but then the sun burns low, upon the flat, mottled Earth, and the…
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Along the river, at the time of pale-blue, the crows flow like black curtains, thousands of them, tens of thousands, enumerable and warm and beating. Just by looking at their wings I can feel the soft mist, the growing west wind, and I can hear the traffic growing dimmer beneath me. We course through,…
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How long has it been since you sat with your back against a tree, and looked up at the dark, straying rivers in the sky? How long has it been since you knelt at a streamside, and listened to the soft water sing of mountain snow, of old times and canyons walls, and the…
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Above the concrete sky, and the rest of the whimsy, we could’ve been real. But you looked down and laughed, and wasn’t I cute? So I pointed for you, to the flat place in the sky where it all caves in, and I guided your hand like a bug on water all legs and…
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Sometimes I ask the moon for guidance. I stand at the window, my breath fogging up the glass, and I reach my hands up. The moon is alive in the way of mountains and rivers, through the long-lived presence of time, and the humming of old things. The clean blue moonlight pours through the…
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You stare through a telescope. There, the craters, and the old seas, like bruises. You stare a bit longer. You see the moon revolve, inch by inch– the slow moon tilting, an avalanche off an edge that is neither light nor darkness. A chill rises on your arms. It’s not just the moon that’s…
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This is not enough. Grass, and horse chestnuts, purple-leaved plums and the maples whose names I do not know. They are lovely, their leaves shaken off by last night’s wind, but behind their nakedness is the lined gray pavement, the dense, impermeable skin, where my footsteps are visitors. At night I look for the…