Tricia Elliott

Origins Black capped shrieks tear the sky into sharp angles  winging vivid pale across blue, catching  the midnight sun’s  horizon light  in scarlet blades. There are none fiercer near nests, except every mother.  It’s unwise to generalize  about arctic terns…

Skipping Stone Sun When the bears emerge, blinking, filling  their risen loaf lungs with  bracing blue sky the sun is already high, skipped  across seas of feathered cloud crests like a thin stone thrown, no longer low-angled but  flicked-winged and…

Wolf’s Track The steady staple shrew tracks ended in  owl wing hush, a loss so singular I mourned. Last night, the long  late winter sun  stained the mudflats frozen rose, the clear sky  persimmon. Even the mountains blushed.  Today, fresh…

Winter Snakes arrive  tight-coiling the night like sky sinews grounded, dark-wrapping the trees with glass-shard scales and the mountains, brilliant  in skin-shed waves  of translucent drape send slides wind-lit, ashen and thunderous, curling sea-soft to mirror pale-stars in spell-blanket light,…

Blessingfor Janet Open the door.  Let the dust blow in and know me again, here in the curved wrist of tree, the salt shade of stone. Nothing is lost that has known this sky,  that has been this old sea. …

Winter Browse In twin-tracks the tender  bark’s peeled away, stripped  bottom-to-top, south-to-north exposing a weathered skin beneath the black willow, marked sentinel body expressed as moose, browsing while the crone snow whorls  through the inky forest her rough, white fingers bending…

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,…