Odessa, Washington: May, 1980 These were the fields of the moon: a dream of crops and the distant cataclysm's new snow ghosting on the roadway, white as elevation markers she could no longer point to on the wall maps. All afternoon across the wheat steppes. Hills mauve with slant-light, spring wheat green-graying to the horizon….
The tree was the tallest spruce Still standing at the edge of the meadow Just down the road from the trailer; He'd dragged it back and set it up In the metal stand, leaving just enough room Between the tip of the spruce and the ceiling For the foil star. She'd baked a few dough…
By then, by the time my brother Was getting married, weeks away from When the old apartment would be pulled down, The evenings were warm and the sounds of Freight trains were absorbed by three oleanders, Whipped by iron sounds and the wind of its passing. By then, by the time I was nineteen And…
1. The Hero He travels on impulse like oceans, thinks nothing of survival. Is one body. Keeps a log. “Dangers fly back and forth over us, sometimes descend.” His job is to keep the ship whole, keep it from scattering the waves. To hold onto the cargo, increase it. 2. Travel The ship's christened Resolution…
in memory of Robinson Jeffers Where the beach ran out By the mouth of the narrow river emptying Into the sea, where the young otters Basked on the porous, sun-licked rocks, Where the scrub pine and oat grass whisked The streaked bellies of birds, Where the collateral tides measured their worth At evening and at…
At twenty, John Berryman raised a fountain pen and wrote, Lear walked his patience by the sea And learned nothing. At the same age, Under the Fresno sun, I was saying to myself, I could get fifty bucks for my Rambler. The car had killed three stripeless cats And splattered a continent of butterflies. I…
In my dreams Buffalo Bill busts down my door with his furry voice. It's like summer lightning, but the strike and the brush fire—the oily sparks of buckskin, sombrero and crimson shirt— shriek to the floor and fizzle out before the hungry calm sets in. I am empty as a mountain, choked with scree and…
How happy the animals seem just now, all reading the sweetgrass text, heads down in the great yellow-green sea of the high plains— antelope, bison, the bull elk and his cows moving commingled in little clumps, the bull elk bugling from time to time his rusty screech but not yet in rut, the females not…
It's staying light later, and through the pyracantha, Through memory and its prickly blood, A teenage boy combs his hair two healthy ways, A flood of rainwater flowing at his floppy shoes, The rain loosening the oils of the street, Freeing the clenched buds on a plum tree. He combs his hair. Something has to…
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