An orange floatplane cuts the drabness of this morning. Perhaps when birds alight and tilt their head it’s not gauging us as a threat but wondering why we don’t fly. The cloud deck is low and so smellcarries, this acreage spiced, medicinal. I have a vision of the sagebrushunder rain, although today will be dry,I’ve seen them lashed, the landmade sea, this house in a floodplain. The finches sing their circular song.The floatplane lands. All this week it will be cooling […]
I wished on the first star and it was a variable star– that seemed somehow appropriate. And was originally named after a falling bird of prey, in some legends reached by a bridge of magpies, which appeals for reasons which should be obvious by now. You are far above these things, never even mentioning your birth date for fear that someone might draw a conclusion from the stars. Did you feel relieved to just forget about […]
Along Echo Ridge the wind sung and we kept hearing voices unsure if it wasa trick of acoustics or our subconscious trying to compensate for the remotenessof the space. Last year’s fires mostly burnt the underbrushwe came across its path now and then but in the cradle of down, scorchedbranches, nascent lupine grows, nature also fond of filling voids.It’s carelessness or lightning that starts them off and from Purte’s View we can see a tree, taller than the rest, set apart, a blackened skeleton […]
Everything is motion in the early-morning heat an ant drags a gravelly husk across the retaining wall I’ve fled outside to drink coffee in peace, requiring a slower start these days, a softer entrance into the world of the living. the bud on the yellow starthistle is revealed to be a bee, technically a noxious weed but I only see the one. How to explain this need for quiet, what dreams did come were not […]
I’ve never seen a swallow fly so high, batted about like a shred of plastic the finches have the loveliest songs, probably in admiration of their own jewel -throated elegance the quails are more reticent and speak mostly in numbers, so prone to alarm and what am I, well into a bottle of white, settled on the deck where just below my feet I think some bird has made its nest under the corner planks, more […]
Them birds againand their themes of peace and reconciliation I was feelinghopeful last night butrealized it was far too comfortable; hope, if anything,a nerve exposed. No, it was somethingelse I felt, a trick of the mind designedto protect, ancient as our diving reflex, as fight or flight, something animal, a kindness to cushion the blow
The half-life of doubt is 3.5 days It’s now been five The rain came in overnightand tufts of cloud sat right on the mountain pass The Skykomish was acolor not yet named and all along the drive petrichor gave wayto verdure new growth on the maples the snow receding foothills bared by the shoulder season ski lifts toothpicks in scale There is nothing like a mountain to fill in a loss, to crowd out thoughts to measure passage It’s been a month at least since I saw the […]
Another dream. You’re never dreaming, only seeing lakes and trees, and if the breeze stirs some childhood reminiscence it passes imperceptibly, a ship in the night. Can I settle for a just a look and just a voice? For yours, I might, and I’m not sure why. Is it a gift to see my grandfather in a leaf, to feel the chill of water even from this height? I’m not sure, either, ready to sell my soul for any sort of […]
When the morning comes, it comes, scraping along like chalk or dread and with it dust and with it doubt that settles down on the most obvious of things. Of course there was nothing else to say. It looks like rain but it won’t rain, some bird repeats the same short call oblivious of the state of things, that this morning of all mornings has come so early and I can hardly breathe for it, let […]
Pythia, a word– In the garden todayand just now above the lake I saw cages of gnats,each individual insect both attractant and repellant,and this is how I frame my question: What will become of us? Or me. I’ve realized nowthat most things are mostly empty space,starting within our cells and reachinginto our speech.
OPTIONAL POETRY 