Tricia Elliott

Drop   And then you see it — your own shattered sky  strewn in feathers  slate blue, still bright against twining tendrils of moss.   Will you turn away?  There is no one to blame or fear. If you allow…

Orientation   The marsh softens and exhales  under humming wings. Bright throated tundra swans aim like arrows — intrepid, true, each feathered compass pointing home.   This is all it takes,  the returning. Even in the grey drape of your…

  Liminal   Imagine an ancient seafloor  rumpled, like a rug, rising from rifts  of broken plates.  This is our story, our orogeny of mountains —  formed by folding and faulting,  fractured layers forced up and out as once soft…

Confluence   Beneath the milky aufeis and the weaving glacial fan, river water runs in a tumbling hum, unraveling winter with sound.   We stir from our dens, crossing winter by spring, braiding valleys with tracks in the sand. Ursine…

Integral   The pull to explain us tugs at your sleeve — sunlight, angles, ice, refraction. Our luminous, flighty aurora is hexagons, scattering light.   Does it reassure you, the defining? Objectivity without wonder can be lonely, a single currency…

  Solute   At your every spring, we appear. Silt, innumerable, staining, arriving whirling in grain after grain as the tumbling flow, the slurry of once shattered snow.   To follow us is to let go of all that was…

  Concurrence   Tracker, between the refreezing night sounds, crisp and starlit, we hear you dreaming of vivid blue skies and mountaintop tundra. Ptarmigan and hare crouch in bearberry and birch. One of us lopes across lichen bright rocks, pauses,…

  Crucible   Above, the goshawk flashes smoke tipped wings, a dark blaze across smudged blue sky.   Such a bare chested faith in feathers, thermals, hollow bones.   Does it dare you to follow, to believe?   Trust isn’t…

  Uncovering   Do you see the antler? There, among the brush and crusted snow extends a single tine, like a nunatak — hinting at what lies beneath.   As you dig and pull and heft, imagine the stony press…

  Reflection   Human, we heard you coming — the tangled, grumbling footfalls drumming the still soft ground, exhales trailing in clouds.   You stopped, crouched near, staring naming another’s bones   nested in goldenseal, bunchberry, moss; these long metatarsals,…