The pine floor looses its last green to the hands of the woman beside me. She takes small stalks — heal-all and aster — to sketch in the evening, of this, the first day of a fast fading October. Only then, slowly searching the underbrush, do we sense the ordered row of quartz markers and…
—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…
Once started nothing stops but for moment breath’s caught time stays patient.
You plummeting shards of the darkness, You rising stars in the light still Fumbling for the rickety trellis Of morning, your suddenness fills The whole unsteady air with whirring Where we awaken quiet together, Breathing soundlessly, no least stirring While your wingbeats alter the weather Of daylight arriving beyond The window, quick-feathered rushing And calling…
All-sufficing person come alive again! Light’s at attention — polite at the end of the sea. High gold & celibate, a bold celestial glare — Here. Sharks in the pines, the park shines. This isn’t the only time. Once before you stood on a hill of sand — wind in your child-like hair — blowing,…
Papa called her Pearl when he came home late, swaying as if the wind touched only him. Towards winter his skin paled, buckeye to ginger root, cold drawing the yellow out. The Cherokee in him, Mama said. Mama never changed: when the dog crawled under the stove and the back gate slammed, Mama hid the…
Swam a dream through the ivory gates. Eden, it was Eden, she moved in a green light not of our skies. Reality denied, her lips hid much joy. Voices rippled in the marvelous garden, verse was composed and rehearsed. Beasts had no fury, fear never entered there. In that wondrous garden God too strolled rich…
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