Tricia Elliott

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…

Yes, and watch this, said the birch.It isn’t about the dancing leaves or dogged snow, but what happens to the vast and windowed sky  as the branches hold first one, and then the otherwith an even-handed devotion. ]]>

Lupine for Zoe  The lupine bloomed late this year, purpling the south-facing slope with glossy necks in proud clusters, strutting through the sedges before the early autumn sun, catching the first snow crystals by quill and vane. It was years…

Seine Night pulls over autumn here not quite like a quilt nor a thick cloud of birds that darken the trees but as an ink-stained sea belly. Winter, pursing its lines across the deeps of this valley, rolls us together…

Benediction Even as the snow is dusting the mountain, like ash the old birch glows with arms outstretched, as if in welcome.  And I stand, wishing this golden season could last – longer than the rattling wind’s reach  from the white…