Poetry

Do butterburs follow a religion,a particular day of the week whenthey take time to meditate or prayinstead of photosynthesize?What does a butterbur believe in—a single God or as many higher powersas exist in the clouds of a mackerel sky?Which spiritual realm lies in the shadeof their stems, their wooly under beards?In the sway of leaves…

from El Cielo En Nuestro Ojos :: An Ecological Inamorata Poem Pulse We look at mud. Marine sediment cores, scientists call them. Overfifty thousand trays, each eight feet long, adorn the mud library inthe Palisades of New York. Here the language of sediment traces.Language of shells that compact inside a microscopic window. Aren’twe all windows of some sort. Glimpses. The curator…

I’ve admired how they leave littleshells of self clinging to bark or edges of jagged leaf, their swarms pacing flightin packs of years. Imagine, every decade an upheaval. Farmers would knowof their coming yet could not stop it, the dark whirring cloud which upon passingbrought a homelessness that beat to bone. I could hear them…

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 vegetable, is a wonder, a blessing Made…

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 ceased,but it has…

Two thousand lightning strikes from last night’s storm.Nothing unusual but record heatand not the least parched godspit of rain.The clamor of photosynthesis cracks. But the young birds birthed in the last month, hatchedinto heat with a bird bath and feeders,shiver-begging, unsleek and disheveled—any adult will do. Droves of siskins, a crowd of red crossbills, dovechilds…

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

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 in the aqueduct.Hawks cast shadows…

My father was a brown man.My mother was white. My father was a very brown man.My mother was a very white woman. My father was born in the jungle.My mother was born in an industrial city. My heart, my little lion—It beats faster to say these things Even after all these years, even afterIt is…