Mountains of Ireland
I saw you once in the mountains of Ireland a narrow stream dropping like a ribbon of ice. Once in a broad leaf trunk smooth and silver, spreading your arms to birds in their flight; on the ridge lines of Oregon green trees forever, in vines crowding the street like kids at a fair. I […]
New Story
What will rise and what will follow, what will fall into the yawning deep? In the earth the sound of water and rush of stones. It is the time of the ancient and the time of soil. Veins open with silver and the round moon shines luminescent gold. Great fish break surface, grasslands thrum with […]
Plum Tree
No one told the plum tree about the end of the world, or the fat layered seal about oceans passing. Changes come, but a pup still cries and salmon rush strong when the last of the snow melts down to the sea. I tell myself of a far reach where her truth pours down like […]
Into the Deep Familiar
The sea shows the edges of her skirts and the slightest bit of skin beneath the rumpled taffeta of wind driven waves and the bright sun of summer, but her deep familiar lies hidden in the depths, rising on a wet-skinned seal or on the jagged rocks left to dry by her departing tide. She […]
Finding My Birth
Something or someone calls not from the dream time but below the sea where the sleek seal dives, or in the belly of the rock that gives shape to water, or the land itself wanting to rise through dry waving grass and release on the wind. Perhaps it’s just me struggling each day to find […]
Harvesting Silence
I harvest silence like a field of hay, threshing intimacy into rows of emptiness, raked and combed by long sharp tines of the inner life, storing silence against the growing hunger, everything so full we starve.
If I Awoke
If I awoke before light, before bird call and waves beating, so early there was only you and me, the only two awake in the whole wide world; while islands slept and we watched the sun break into the sky with the radiance of a star. Then we would know our place in the arms […]
Coyos
One man has left the earth; his wolf-dog went before him scouting the way on the old journey into the timeless; leaving behind his music, his trickster, the joy he fired from the grief of his family to forge a life on the high mesa. Playing his flute to the four directions, to the animals […]
First Light
I caught first light in those few hours when the innocence of the world played open like a child’s skirts, twirling in the breeze with the joy of being alive.
Ancient Circle
Now I awaken, grief and fear drained from my body, words of prayer green as summer rising with the faith of sunlight. Like a black winged crow brooding on the roof top I pick at scavenger bits, cawing to the world my dissatisfaction, but today I am stripped, open like a river, the voice of […]
Dispatch from the Front
There are terrors that restrain the heart with iron fence where open land once graced the sky. You see it in a child’s eyes, feel it in your chest when theft becomes an option. It’s too late to blame, only time for the music you can make, your dispatch from the front opening the heart […]
Rising on the Old Rope
The uncertainty of night and random dreams pass, the empty bucket of morning echoing dully as it lifts from the deeper darkness, drawing up the cool draught of what rises on the old rope to the trembling light of day.
Endless Page
The words I speak or write, do they really matter beneath the waterfall of life, all the tragedy and loss and wandering in the dark? I have so much fear I don’t acknowledge, so much I hoped for, wanting the world to answer my longing. When I listen I hear the old voice within the […]
Moon of Our Gravitation
You raise your cup assured I will receive it. This gesture says it all, how we are together with no need to tear down, to feed the beast of not belonging. Some days the tide runs strong, highs and lows much greater. They say it is the moon and I wonder about swirling water and […]
Chum for the Gods
We’re chum for the gods, dropped into the sea to lure out the beauty stored in deep water, from before time began when only mineral and fire ruled the earth. She can’t resist the sparkling scales of our foolish wit, the way we twist and turn in shifting currents, singing to her of the times […]