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…
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.
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.
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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,…