Tricia Elliott

Like the Moon entire, even in shadow  and storm, obscured when hung like a rim of ice  from a glass  bowl, reflecting  all the light there is or will be surgical, meaning precise and steady drawing each molecule in  every…

Samhain Even the air is thin.  The giving ground cracks  in brittle bones  underfoot the dust of things scatter as ice shards. Every step leaves a track marked  by crushed moss, shattered leaves, broken branches no matter how gently passed…

Bearberry, Autumn We know about grief, said  the scarleted bearberry, densely thicketing  rock to rock, twining with heather, avens, salix, wolf  and blue. Surely you remember, it said  reflecting a silvered sky and the antlered  moss, paler than snow  near…

August No, not that way, they giggled moving like sun-shafts between branch and leaf  winged, gossamer, horned, talon-toed  taking my hand they tugged me  not closer, but into, or across some barely perceptible  line to see the once purple wolves,…

Watershed Case I’m not saying they are the unmoving, blind stones — I don’t really believe stones are unmoving or blind, not truly — but on that scale-heavy day, on that glaciated, wind-whipped divide, as I stood between two massive…

Compass Plant Silene acaulis A sly wind threads the muck-moated hillocks drawing reeded breadths across lichen-rough stone, shuttle humming. What is  that song, I ask believing I have nothing to lose  in the asking  as open-throated terns cross  the beaming,…

Pandora’s Heart I.  I could open it for you, said the gyrfalcon, all talons, and I remembered. The spruce branch felt rough as the cross-hatched handle, the cold steel slick in sweaty latex. Needles nearby trembled, though the winds remained…

Geography* for Stella Like sutures in a skull  we have stitched ourselves together two lives in apposition at the measured pace of bone smooth here jagged there a mountain range of moments  tracked in zippered contour lines which have led…

Portal Some are hollows, said the trees, and will take you  entire. Others, like boughs, reach in all directions and return, flush with light. This one  is an inner ring, glabrous and  ring-porous, a vessel shaped by needle-shimmer and snowmelt,…

Chickadee Dreams While the Cailleach sleeps, gather kindling. Not to feed  winter’s hunger but to know with each twig snap and lichen rise the chickadee dreams  in squirrel branch sways and hemlock eyes. Nearby  the nuthatch tides, sounding the sweet…