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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
A jar full of shells. A beeswax candle. A jellyfish captured in glass. A paper lantern from Seattle; its cranes, yellow, splashed by the sea. Dried lavender in a vase, the flowers still purple, the stems both brittle and damp. A carved wooden owl. A Himalayan salt lamp. A carton of pencils made to…
How soft the rain sounds, like pebbles flushed through a stream, click, and click, then all at once, like the inside of a wave as it breaks, polyphony, the voices and their colors. the shifting powders of soil, the ants and pill bugs drowned in soup-like puddles, the robins warmly puffed up, their eyes…
They stretch long; the wings of birds pulsed up in flight, silhouettes positioned on rust, orange as the backs of deer, sunlight quietly waiting.
With each step the rocks are new Pink sunset, blue distance, pale but not brittle Against all my judgement I have the feeling that the rocks are alive We all move in the sun Naked, curled trees; one smooth branch of juniper in a slot canyon Raven on the sandstone gluck-gluck-click I am not alone…
You never loved the water more. You blink at the stream and feel that you are home, but even the cottonwoods are darker, and carry the bulk of firs. The stream is not so shaded that you can’t see your reflection and the naked mountain behind your head. This is your great river now; this…