Tricia Elliott

December Bear My nape hairs rise as the bear saunters nearand I drop everythingto watch it move like water, or my memory of it, unfrozen, as in spring,a flowing locomotive in shoulders of inkchurning like the night, or a river,…

  Hospitality   Here affirmed the crossbills here, and right here which is just the place  you had turned from   away from some emotion and its bothersome visit at some inconvenient hour   like now   but as you…

  Grace   Again you returned  to the break in the trees where an old nurse log lay, snow-drifted like an altar in a glade  of its own making   and daily, like a prayer  or an apprentice, you learned…

Complexity Sometimes I long for it, the simplicity of less,for then maybe I could hold it alland grasp some secret that thrums within but even in this spartan season the forest laughs in shadows,layering itself with a heady, needled light,…

  Phoenix   You stare, flustered by the candy apple sky   that licks at the day with overbright flames  and leaps in tongues  too big  for all that you know   until now as you stand, clear eyed in…

  Stones   Meet it with softness said the stones   and you turned, puzzled by the words that crunched  underfoot   while a clear dawn lit the dark stones  like candles burning brighter than the ice fingered hands  …

  Change   You look longingly at the gap between birch root and moss seeing more than just  hole or nest   but home then, haven  for those  at a loss out of hand in the thicket  of change  …

  Music   For years you have paused at this moss-crowned stump and listened    for something   sent  like a dispatch from its rough-hewn world   a word, perhaps or a single, unwavering note heard like other music  …

  Enough   There is more to it than  this   though it dazzles as wet leaves  like  iridescent scales   carpeting the forest floor with fish and filling the tree-lined shallows  with so much light   that any thought…

Corporeal It isn’t about that, said the hare,its poppy petal remains scattered across snow. I hesitated, clutching at equations, wanting to explain away mess, and loss,or deviations like pain, at the mean, and parameters of grief, but the hare laughed…