Tricia Elliott

  Winter   Winter has pulled its cap  over the sky   freezing in edges wrapping your ridge lines in rime and firn    an icy and delicate hand  that sometimes, like you, cracks open.   Look there, along your…

  Newcomer   An elephant now rests in the meadow by the alder patch   its great trunk unrolled  between shadowy tusks,  long   like the winter that stretches  before us draped in frosted skin wrinkled by wind   and…

  Unrepeatable   It can be difficult to stay   even as the sky fills with feathers in colors swept  with wings   wielding their unrepeatable ritual too bright to retain   yet even by turning away you gleam within…

Solstice   And then you look up stilled by sky   suspended like a winter bear beneath snowy tree asleep at the darkest reach of an earthen tide.   Be here just as you are   tilted like the smoky…

  Propelled   Snow settles gently  on the pages of December, softening the old stories, blurring the edges as night swallows day, a jawline laced in sunset and icicles.   As you watch, drifted, mouse  appears propelled   like a…

  Rattled   Just as the earth beneath you shifts again   the sky fills with winded fingers at full roar racing to pluck wintry skin from the mountain and toss it like dust into the air.   Go ahead.…

Possibility   Owlsong fills the forest  like a full breath  blown through hollow bones while stars spin the sky  in cool clarity   and it grows   building like hoar frost, one molecule at a time, stacked in delicate pernicity, …

  Peeling   Geese cut overhead like a joyful knife, skinning a winter’s dawn,   and you look down  at the blade  held  by your own hand — the one quietly severing your own wing — and  set it down.…

    Fathoms   There will be days  when    no matter how wise or willing your step   only a tree can contain  the sky that would drown you, vast in its blinding expanse, swirling your grief in its…

  Reach   Within the cadaver colors  of early winter   needle ice  grows steadily in crystal bones   pushing through the earth  by night its translucent skeleton   moving millimeter  by millimeter   stretching its skin  until it bends…