you always know where you are I cannot relate (to know where you are you must be in one place) even now this toe is in the ocean this hand still touching the train that left this ear full of a child’s wailing this one, a bird, far-off you can go anywhere in the alpine (what you carry is only what you packed) rare air above the talus slops but even on a summit I […]
Out on a lake out on a boat the perfect place for one who wants to rest and one who wants to go
while we were gone the lettuce bolted the pea pods grew outsized and tough still, full of pearls to dry, let harden and plant again next year— an absurd generosity asking only for some time
First the sow and then the cub flat-faced, gouache-furred up above the service road climbing the bike trail through thick black alder— then the cub but not the sow, still not the sow, just wind in the tall grass, presentiments and doubts . A day later, at the border, waiting in line, looking at photos, car after car, lurching forward, again the menace of the unseen, an arbitrary line, truck routes, corn fields drawn at […]
the age of this place! and still it said the basalt flows of the Garibaldi range are relatively young— one could say something, then, maybe, about lenses, about powers of scale, how a thing comes into focus, so another falls away, something about the buoyancy of names, floating above a place, vagaries of translation, of words soft as wet ash, how this alphabet cannot spell them, how silt turns this lake otherworldly and opaque, how […]
arboreal sigh the wind lifts the boughsand lets them fallpresaging rainthese little tells—the terse alarm callsof the nuthatchessaying maybe, maybe the cougars have comedown low after stalkingin pairs two mountain ranges overso unusually bold—perhaps a harbingerthe canopy dense the understory opening up like a secretno berries are ripe yetbut among the stands of mountain ash like clarion bellsa slew of tiger lilies
We followed the creeka river, reallyloud in its bankslouder still underthe amphitheaterof a bridge—a striking huesomething primordialless green than bluebut not fully eitherrunoff from a glaciermelting unseenhigh in the mountainabove usa supposition—most of the foothillsblanketed by clouds.We picked up rocksand guessed wildlyat their provenanceGranite? Shale?and threw them backinto the wateror ricocheted themoff boulders to skipthem far into the deepand I wonderwhen you are olderwill you see these flightsas random chanceor as probabilitiesunpredictable, but known—and will […]
You ask every day now what is distance I point to the mountain white and still as an etching foreshortened and rising as if from the lake you are now gleaning that words are slippery fish two-faced wide-eyed dull or gleaming depending on which way the scales lie
A quiet morning, with bird, and the slow exhale of the furnace. The fire stutter starts, we all come to life. Maybe today they will find the new feeder, or the popcorn we scattered, grown soft in the rain. The wild here is more wild than before, not easily enticed. Maybe we will find what the coyotes caught last night, unholy screams, then, unnerving silence. Milk clouds this tea, a leaf sinks, then rises, like […]
a short sunbreak barely an hour otherwise it is still save for water falling from branch to boulder say an echo of the prior rain the stone worn smooth from years of the same year’s end time is somehow more perceptible say the way a sunbeam is caught in low-lying mist the way memories return to fill empty space the garlic has sent up new green shoots like swords, or say tongues–
OPTIONAL POETRY 