Slowly you wake, cocooned in your sleeping bag,secure in the knowledge that your tent holds nothing more scented than your intrusive human flesh.No bear bait, no enticements for mice, no elk aphrodisiac. You stretch warmth into rigid muscles, feel the fading ofdowny dreams, see solid breath. Beneath you a mere skin ofearth, delicate as a […]
Today I drive out, secretly, a day-tripper into my past, a vacationer headed for beloved country now lost to me. Sold. I return to the only 40 acres I know anything about, trespass beyond field’s edge, where a ditch cleaves the soil, coughs up clotted clay into a berm of crumbly rubble sown with rough […]
I will give you green in its hundred shades, from the barest hint threaded along the growing golden stalk, to the near-black shadow caught between thick spruce needles I will give you light, the hard-edged morning’s etched exposure focused through dew’s magnifying glass, and the flat, direct burning of noon, and this afternoon amber, flowing […]
Wind … your voice keening across the prairie comes to me in foreign languages, a whisper in the aspen thicket, or heavily accented with evergreen, your breath smelling of spruce gum and camphor. At first I did not like you, did not trust your movements as you stirred, or the clanging as you rattled the […]
Prominent silver. You transform midnight’s moonlight into the blood of the land. Between river banks you capture the lightning flash of shooting stars. Your dance extends high above your frothing frenzy, laces the leaping crests of moving water with spicy ozone, a pulmonary elixir that penetrates the lungs. A circulation system, vast, connective, you carry […]
