Tricia Elliott

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…

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…