Poetry

Glendale Mill, 1837–2004

Red brick textile mill just barefoot steps from red brick company store, and barefoot steps from red clay graves, the apparition children make their hazy way up the hill at 6:30, quitting time after twelve-hour shifts. Maybe they are doffers, small, nimble fingers a commodity in the risky removal of spike spindles, bobbins full of…

At the Base of the Marsh

Do butterburs follow a religion, a particular day of the week when they take time to meditate or pray instead of photosynthesize? What does a butterbur believe in— a single God or as many higher powers as exist in the clouds of a mackerel sky? Which spiritual realm lies in the shade of their stems,…

Gouges of Us

from El Cielo En Nuestro Ojos :: An Ecological Inamorata Poem Pulse We look at mud. Marine sediment cores, scientists call them. Over fifty thousand trays, each eight feet long, adorn the mud library in the Palisades of New York. Here the language of sediment traces. Language of shells that compact inside a microscopic window. Aren’t we all windows of some…

Cicadas

I’ve admired how they leave little shells of self clinging to bark or edges of jagged leaf, their swarms pacing flight in packs of years. Imagine, every decade an upheaval. Farmers would know of their coming yet could not stop it, the dark whirring cloud which upon passing brought a homelessness that beat to bone….

Sonnet

Sonofagun, what a rambunctious sun!—  Flaunting its feather boa of cloud, it’s  Done with slumming behind the horizon,  It blazons and hastens the birds to what’s   Blooming. Our backyard’s a carnival,   Carmine and cardinal, ripe apricots  Chandeliering on breezes, ambrosial,  And in this light I believe everything  On this bright and ruinous earth, animal   Or…

Wind and Road

The wind is named, like us, for where it comes from. The road is named, like us, for where it goes. All winds are the one wind. All roads turn into other roads. Sometimes I think the road has ended, but it has turned behind me and gone home. Sometimes I think the wind has…

More and More

More and more, when I’m walking—and it seems I’m walking more and more—I turn around Because something has called to me and more And more it’s me as a child back there, walking with a friend or a ball or both—and he’s happy and that makes me happy, even when he doesn’t Seem to know…

Where the Palm Meets the Pine

The hour splits with dust somewhere between north and south. A pine tree sways, disappears. A palm tree sways, appears. I am an exile from the California of my childhood. Grass whistles between my father’s grave and mine. The wind raises dust on my mother’s house, cloaking the yard. I listen for water trapped deep…