Snow Trails
It’s been snowing all day, large dry flakes floating down without leaving a trace except on walking trails I’ve built that curve round the house like a Priest’s surplice, before descending to a mountain stream in the hollow, where massive boulders, heaved up from the earth long ago, make deep pools beside white water thrust against granite. Inuits believe snow has many voices and snow sticking to only one surface might be a voice ‘gently speaking’, a sign of grace, or maybe ‘the narrowness of the gate’. Next spring when I...
Read MoreCentred
the sun stands midway between my hands as I reach for icicles from the eaves while rosehips hang frosted with snow solstice bread rises in the grate I open curtains for my lost love
Read MoreThe Shield
Invisible as glass, a shield hangs, from sky to scuffed concrete, from east to west and sunrise round to sunrise, between me and the world. A barrier I seemed to slip through with alcohol as catalyst, altering molecules like fire and fork scrambling an egg, itself remaining unchanged, while I, apparently on the other side, exuberant, headlong, almost heedless from pole to pole and sunset up to sunrise, was on a course to fry my brain. Now, behind (or inside) the barrier – if it even exists, except as I create it – headstrong, almost giddy, I recombine words in poetry like fire in an iron...
Read MoreLate November
one minute, the sun was out, it was fall. Geraniums under a quilt last night, a blotch of red opening. On the front step what looked like lint has small pink claws and feet. Next the sky was the color of lead. Geraniums under a quilt last night like a child you’ve tucked in or a body wrapped in the earth under leaves. In the swirl of sudden snow, what was left of the headless fur blows west Like a child you’ve tucked in whatever was living, a just born squirrel I suppose, hardly a living thing ...
Read MoreViolet Jelly
picking the leaves Monday early in a cool rain huddled in wet sweatshirts. Hours in the grey, knees and fingers numb. Our skin smells of violets while they soak in the red pan overnight till we boil the green. Then the pectin turns them lilac. We pour them into glass, amethyst the sun comes thru on the window after...
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