Maybe I was asleep in dawn, the grandestdame that ever unbent me like a willow. Isn’t nature my ma, my salve and solving?Soon the sun had arisen, leaving velvet marks on foxes secure in ferny hideouts,squirrels thronging for fallen acorns, branches torn from oaks in tornado watches, cloudycovers on me. And all my secrets scattered….
follow the back road’s twist & turn, try to lose the red-winged blackbird’s scolding lyrics—hurry on past— hum with summer insects’ soundscape that doesn’t bitelike the mosquito woods that root dark & twisted their shadow & light move like the East Twin River that offers water for the Thompson Familyold growth maple that transforms sunlight into oxygen inhale & you becomepart of this place
It was the summer, almost dawn,the windows open, curtains drawn.It was the kind of light that brushes pink bands along the dunesand opens its fingers through privetrubbing salt mist against the screen and bleaching the fox who dragsa bluefish tail and spine from hisjaws before he enters spirals of brambles and disappears.Sometimes, when the dark…
Today, without authority, I woke to morning birds.Without authority, today recalled the feral night that fled.Without authority, I listened to today’s trucks passing— their diesel hauling diesel, hauling batteries, sent-back clothes.Without, today, authority, I pondered their drivers’ lives, their drivers’ children.Without authority, I stood above—too quiet to hear, today or any day— root-mats of fungi.Without authority, I…
“Listen close,” she says in my ear, “I’m someonetoo, I’m someone telling you secrets, systems.”Dusk, my body, opens for tender breezes,broken but breathing. “Call your question, wait for the answer stormymornings, in the thunder,” she tells me. Forecastdry to drought to making my hurt eyes water,mountain to valley. “Talk to sky,” she tells me. I…
1 In 1953, what sprang up all over, took charge:new housing tracts, supermarkets, gas station grand openings,great smoggy pyres of bulldozed orange groves. I kept track from our creaky, high-water, clapboard bungalowat 402 West Elm. Pedaled my bike to all those great giveaways,all that free candy, all that gaga grand opening grandeur. On July 17,…
built 1879–1912 by Ferdinand Cheval, mail carrier and artist A postman builds a palace stone by stone.He hears a stone say where the site should be,carries it there, and carries others there.The site is his address.Thirty-three years it takes him, more or less.The message is delivered when he’s done.The spires rise stubbornly,as though ideals were…
I wonder what the smoke of a dead swan’s body smells like. Like the wind through a keyhole from a different century. Like my dead mother’s jacket, wet from rain and bombs. Sometimes, I find a raindrop on its sleeve. Some mornings, smoke rises from the collar. How a body obediently burns …
The tree crew has come,restored a long-vanished view of the mountain.My eyes are again thirty-two. My life is still seventy-one. My life is startled. It lifts, as the many heads of a herd of horsesall at once do, hearing a sound. Heads raise, ears raise, to listen. How used it had grown to only the smallest of…
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