May 1, 2020
Collapse
I don’t know how to have time make time buy time don’t know how to be on time as if time were a chair a pony carnival ride a bike […]
May 1, 2020
When One Known to You Dies, the Rearranging of Space and Time Begins
— for Ladders, 2019 (Balaenoptera physalus) A rib (I know whose) in the harbor under waves. How heavy would it be, hefted? Low tide will bare it, will allow pickers to […]
May 1, 2020
Poem Beginning with a Line from Claudia Rankine
Mostly I resist the flooding — except for Tuesday, when it crept up my shoulder and neck. The doctor prescribed Valium and prednisone. My sister drove me. It is worse now […]
May 1, 2020
Two Mule Deer
walked past my window this morning — female I think, no antlers, as the day-moon pressed like a faded thumbprint into the bare back of the Santa Cruz Mountains and the meadow […]
May 1, 2020
A Field Guide to Mythological Botany
And yet love’s own death can make beauty, too, a slain Adonis’s blood transformed into this field of red anemones. Hyacinth’s blood blooming into larkspur. Demeter’s mortal love, Mekon, memoralized […]
May 1, 2020
A Blessing
These are the still days the days of quiet light and night stars days empty even of grief days of tree-dapple and meadowsweet of leaf-swirl and cicada hum let them […]
May 1, 2020
Sumac
with lines borrowed from James Wright A scarlet staghorn sumac ignites the ditch and marks an end to one more teeming season in these woods. The furry wand is called […]
May 1, 2020
Monarch
Whether they find the milkweed By sight or smell, they drift by us & care nothing for our witness. Or the ridiculous name, honoring An Orange king. So little time […]
May 1, 2020
Rising Variance as an Early Warning
Today mother transplanted herself to the back deck without the walker. It was the sun, her first time out since the fall. The verb falling, the fractures curing, her eyes […]
May 1, 2020
New Year
In the last year I’ve been unable to banish a single monster slavering in the light of the moon, or rid my days of this stupid old man in Washington […]
May 1, 2020
And the Wild Grapes Do Their Very Bluest
She tells me you can eat them but not now, though I only want to mark their hue, a blue somewhere between the inner branches of spruce and the wake […]
May 1, 2020
Love as a Succession of Absences
Thoreau notes not only the purple woodbine berries, his snapping turtle trailing its yolk sac, but what he has not seen — the bobolinks for ten days, the blackbirds since August 28. […]