Tricia Elliott

Follow Spring presses in, circling my ribbed fences, leaping easily to merry mud-track across the clean creased floors of my itching palms  leaving grit to sit like a calling card  wedged between whorl and nail, addressing the unnamed parts of…

Cranesong So it turns out  falling stars aren’t suns gone dark but rocks on fire, an alchemy of dust  meeting sky  and only appear to fall  by streaking toward or slipping away to cross some threshold, a veil hidden  until…

Tribute It was how shadows in blue branches made tributaries  across snow. I paused, not yet thinking about eons of early spring suns but of one long ago dawn, indelible and new, gilding  the deep pines with its fragile birr,…

Kinglet for Inger It wasn’t always like this. For years I mourned you with sackcloth, stirring the ashes with a stripped stick, broken from a tree I could not see. The sun returned  warm as ever, but without you my…

Clouds As the wind, sly-fingered, plucked at the hemlocks they shivered, gently, shedding fine showers of snow from their gloved hands. Beneath them, something cracked like snapped twig or sudden sneeze between branches.  I looked, expecting flash of squirrel or…

Forest Hello, said the spruce cone, and teetered on its tip  before toppling to one side near my foot.  Hello there, I said, and admired its snowy track, a slipping  slide stride down the slope.  Those look like vole tracks,…

February Dragons The sun summons dragons, knob-spined and snow-scaled, coming in smoking to stain the liquid-lit sky with ruby and ember and sometimes lashed pinkso that the denser hues fade into watery sea-colors, leaving a hotrind so pale it melts into…

Spruce Grouse Frost Both winter’s firm grip and a feel-your-way fog  has opened this ridge  like a waning moon’s face, seemingly still yet steady it treads in vaporous steps  until it spruce grouse thunders with heart-thrumming startle leaving winging banks…

Tree Mink It looks nothing like it, that inky drip of summery mink who streamed into my winter’s dream and filled my hands — soft, dense, warm in wriggling slink, strange in a season that chapsand cracks but here and…

December 2020 Hello! I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve decided to wait and not publish today’s poem, insteadposting it as the last poem of 2020, on the winter solstice(it’s a solstice-y poem). After that, bearbones and I plan to hibernate…