Treasure

Treasure Twice now the younger dog has brought home bony bits of dried, twisted skin, one side pale-rough, the other dense with soft brown fur so like her own. I too have nosed some treasure out of forest duff, like…

Treasure Twice now the younger dog has brought home bony bits of dried, twisted skin, one side pale-rough, the other dense with soft brown fur so like her own. I too have nosed some treasure out of forest duff, like…

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…