Poetry

Once at night we saw them along the coast's rough edge, a dozen fishermen torching, waist-deep in the shallows. The moon half gone, dragged the tidewater across the coral and over the reef's ledge into the open sea. And as they moved slowly sliding their glass boxes across the water's dark face, some held their…

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…

You should know the kind of morning it is— one gods have argued over for years. But I've decided I'm under a Byzantine curse out of which endings situate themselves like deep forests. The players are strewn in the empty heart of a house. She's called up her lost cat who kept her comfortable when…

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…

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….

In the last grove of ohia, mamane, and gray-green koa at the top of the Mauna Loa Strip Road, we met a ranger coming down. He had been hunting a feral goat that had broken through the fence. Such animals destroy the forest understory and native plants, and spread weeds that drive out the more…

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…

These thorny ferns are what Kama-pua‘a, the Pig God, looked like when he wished to disguise himself. When he took this form, he had no visible eyes but he could see, no nostrils but he could smell, no bristles but he could feel every sulfur wind that touched his reddish fronds. He looked exactly like…

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…