Tricia Elliott

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,…

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…