Poetry

Prologue: It’s traditional to begin by telling you this: this was once Chada’s sukdu. In the retelling it becomes my sukdu’a. For the unfamiliar, sukdu is story. Sukdu’a is a story that’s become a personal story. I’ve decided that it’s akin to how some people build familial homes. Oh this? It’s our ancestral family home!…

Planes rise from the neighbor’s Norfolk pine As if floating. Sometimes I float too In the brilliant afternoons of not-knowing. As the aftershock of the infusions Lays me back in the cloud of the recliner, I stare with fierce new interest From our glass-walled living room At the world that always continues. I sleep these…

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…

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,…

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…

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….

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…

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…

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