—Port Townsend, Washington I go down to the beach with its lengths of kelp, one with a holdfast clutching a pebble. It doesn’t matter how small it is, the harbormaster says, it does the job. I don’t miss you so much. I’m surprised. Maybe it’s because the sky is always changing, cumulus to stratus, stratus…
September cooling to October stops the throat with a doughy phlegm; a hundred years ago “lung fever” killed thousands, left the rest to cabin fever — then, for whoever emerged from that white chrysalis: spring. Dying, my grandmother took an interest in migration, tallying species at the hospital feeder. I almost believed the evening grosbeak…
If only I could tell you how wildness-shows the space between us and the green world; how an island is the same island with our presence, but with that presence we lose some hope of seeing, say, a horse, or the dead gnarled limbs of an oak sunk in sand. Edward Weston saw it in…
Truly the dead float there, though we cannot see them they bathe their arms in the blue, near the shore for it is not true the sky has no shore though sometimes it is only gauze, unrolling length by blue length as when we were children we stood in the store, in the musty corner…
Here in purgatory bare ground is visible, except in shady places where snow prevails. Still, each day sees the restoration of another animal: a sparrow, just now a sleepy wasp; and, at twilight, the skunk pokes out of the den, anxious for mates and meals. . . . On the floor of the woodshed the…
They appeared on the beach as I walked by, the bodies, sprawling on towels immodestly, impervious to stares by what integrity they owned which let them abandon their winter clothes. As they lay in the street, I watched them and followed a man’s search for his wife: a familiar shape and texture, perfume rising from…
It’s visitor’s day At the end of the night As a mirror keeps hurrying Another wedding through the moon The survivors looking back with satin or top hats . . . Scraps of the calendar Fill the dull air The altar of the hospital Dim as lamps in wartime It’s December again The year gods…
Years ago, in a plane over California, I suddenly thought I understood Keats’ sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be . . .” I felt changed by the experience, both thrilled and calmed. At the time I worked as a “gofer” for a small film company. IBM was flying us around…
There lay behind her clothes, in her spacious closet, a hidden sanctuary, a Chinese fortress. Emperors abdicated to paint moments: under willows a brief calm ensued at a ferry-landing; three travellers with a gray pony waited on an angle of land for the ferry, to the left, in hazy sunlight, and farther to the left,…
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