Tricia Elliott

  Hoar Frost   Sometimes, conditions create gems out of fog and chill and darkness.   What seemed an endless, wintry unchanging   one morning greets us, flashing fractals of illumination,   transforming self-similar patterns into crystalline truth. ]]>

Sanguine   The moose walks into the blowing snow, unhurried. Such a steadfast pace, this sanguine peace within the gale.   Snow gathers on guard hairs. Adorned, it crosses the clearing, patiently placing each step, climbing the drifted slope, kissing…

Definitions   Apoptosis: the highly regulated enzymatic process of intentional cellular death.   Why death? What if the intention was life? No, I understand our careful definitions wield a distance from within. They are so useful and so valid.  …

  Sum   Stillness holds motion. Don’t believe us? Look closer. Lichen look still, even simple,   but our universe is not. We are an alliance of algae and fungi, a symbiosis of two kingdoms. We drape from trees, spread…

  Unadorned   The owl blinked over yellow eye moons, then dismissed the screaming, diving jays with one hiss each.   Every heart knows the unadorned truth. It is this clean hiss, this unruffled stand, this flash of mirrored light.…

Moonlit   Sometimes things align.   Yes, I’ll wait while you knock on wood and give me that look like now, now you’ve done it. Now you’ve invited that other shoe and the sky, falling, and that single bolt of…

Suturing A shrew moves in moonlight,tracking across the broken snow. You have felt this small, a lone heart pounding in the darkness.Claim your trail. Open the frozen meadow, like the shrew.As it rediscovers home, it sutures all things together. Power…

  Migration As you grasped the bony curve, lifting it from the riverbank into the shifting, slanting light, it became the most beautiful thing you had ever seen. An antler, dropped by passing caribou, pressed cool and coarse within your…

Ally   The day you ran from the moose, lurching off the trail to crouch behind trees,   everything changed. I don’t mean you were trampled — outside of your mind, that is — you know, the way people are…

Signature   We’ve seen them too, the striations. Those lines in the rocks, glacial grooves cut mostly parallel like cambium, or teeth, broken here and there by chattered debris.   In snow and willow we watch you kneel, then squat…