Tricia Elliott

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…

Creek Dream When the winter creek gurgles, snow-hushed and ice-bellied  I wonder if bear hears it too, but merry and sun-lit as a summer-drift dream mumurating in time to a leaf-dappled drum silver-scaled and berry-thick beneath a sedge-fingered sky. I…

Sentinel Once a raven with a yellow ball flew by  as though it held the winter sun in its beak  and I thought  I too know how to carry an idea and send it skyward. An old birch showed me…

Blood Moon Look, said the moon rising like smoke above the coire  to gild the inky breath of  snow while one white hare  becomes lynx, its crimson steam spinning  across the unmarked meadow to curl its sky  into my dense…

Devotions Meanwhile, rut-tugged moose press against velvet sky dens sounding hoofed ridges  into aspen-tined bends, earth-spruced  and wallowed. Meanwhile, scents uncurl  into ermine-river whirl cottonwood fur-berry to silver stone burl, sinewy and root-needled  grey bark against snow. Meanwhile, alder-quaked lynx…

Ocean Sound I left the mountains for ocean sound. Every year I do this, chasing a childhood  glimpse so bright and terrible it wakes me still, sends me  to pace across damp  earth breathing in stars until it calls again…

Summer Bones It must have happened with my back turned to the sea, head full of green-song and forget-me-not blue. Somehow I’d missed the signs. Summer’s feet tightened in a breath, wet nose lifting. It trotted upslope as if summoned,…

Hunger On a zipper catch breath they slipped  from the trees, moving as meadow. Three bears  rolling closer on river-rock feet  toward the window where I stood having just lost the way to everything’s name except bear and oh Until one…

June This isn’t a poem about joy, but of what grows around it. A vining thing — glossy, clandestine, fiddlehead-coy and arnica-bright near forget-me-not blue. It bursts vivid as the unconstrained sea — and brief as its bore tide. Like…