New then: gravel roads, dry wells, school bus, sumps and skunks.
Bed bathed in moonlight, dog at the foot, moose hide at the head
Horse shoes, bridal path, purple gas, party-line phone, cannon bone. They learned.
Together through snowdrifts, hay fields, country lanes. A three-legged race.
Who knew that straw brooms are not the same as chains? Horses […]
One small chalk handprint left
on the back door of the house
so recently emptied, scrubbed clean
of the fragments of another family,
other lives, younger times.
That smudged handprint clicks
a slideshow of memories, blue eyes
too intense, too wise for one so young,
small Cheerio mouth birthing words
like bubbles, tubby feet bare and on the trot,
a crayon, a piece of chalk […]
When I was grass
I sucked up the letter “S”
swallowed it whole, let it slide
up my slender shoots, satisfied
with it’s slippery simplicity,
it’s shape, that one line squiggle,
standing upright and strong, savored
those saccharine scents of saffron,
smoke, and sage, imitated it’s sound
in the shifting and the stirring
of my swaying spears gossiping
in the long slow swim of summer.
When I […]
Inspired by Patrick Lane’s poem
“Under The Sun In The Dry, Desert Hills Where The Rain Never Falls In August”
Knee deep in liquid sky, a heron bides time in tall sedge shadows.
Canola, fluorescent yellow, a horseshoe frame for this mirrored water.
Among the swirl of, sandpiper, starling, sparrow, flash of blackbird; nothing as still.
The heron lifts one […]
Grass is the cloth of the prairies,
a pattern of roots woven underground.
In darkness threads of fescue,
vetch, old man’s whiskers,
needle and spear, porcupine,
brome and bluegrass twine
and entwine to bind
the earth together. Grass
emerges like the tip of an iceberg
in a land too dry for forests,
too wet for desert, shows
only its hair. On the surface,
foliage, flowers, […]
