Rain
I went out on my porch around nine at night and listened to the trees reciting rain. It had been falling all that afternoon. At some point that I missed, that something-like-that-Zen way of feeling the World overcame me (whatever me is) and the World went its way Without me — Only that sound, Trees, And someone I remember that might have been me Reciting...
Read MoreThe Romantic
On bleary mornings, Eos on my way to work, twenty years, my matins, I passed a coppice, a sloughing of limbs, tall, splendid oaks, condensed diorama forest emerging from haze. I’d envision a doleful wanderer, an abbey ruin, Casper David Friedrich’s bleak, romantic painting. The modern came crashing, suddenly a rude huffing, greasy bulldozer, a hole in the ground, a house, concrete, lumber, vinyl, bramble of wire and pipe, razing my sublime, though the trees seemed glad for the company — too much gloom. Who knows? Kids may play in bits of shade, long summer...
Read MoreMushroom
When I went to prune The limbs, groom the hairy, Disheveled springs, I discovered, High in a crook of the apple tree, A slight, soft armpit hollow, Or the tender back of a knee, A solitary mushroom growing there. What an obscene little phallus, White, erect, exquisite, its round Head a button for a king’s mantle, The stem curved precisely As a girl’s peduncular leg, The underside delicately gilled, A sea creature undulating Along the bottom of the Pacific. How did the spore find This remote place, improbable Shangri-La perched on the Himalayas, Miniature utopia for...
Read MoreEmily as the Lavender Irises Burst
Cedar-bound & watching the sky lose a battle to Emily’s carving, I am lightning working a way through the wood & chasing her colors as they take over the night.
Read MoreIsolation in a Passenger Car
I descend from the higher Rockies to Deer Lodge, very much the high plain. At 3 miles sun reflects from a window. The land coincides in its one identity, except this window soon to bounce its light to dialectical dark of the cosmos. Personally I can not challenge the sight. Greedy for the compensations of space, I refuse to broadcast my fugitive fantasy of my isolation at rest in a passenger car. But for beauty, I rue my caterpillar pace slowed on my itinerary, too short of...
Read MoreFeatured Works: Week of May 20 (Spring)
Spring has been a long time coming in the Northern Hemisphere, but it is finally here. Our contributors celebrate the changing of the seasons. “Riparian Life” by John Zedolik accompanies Canadian geese back south with the spring warmth. In “I Could Be Charlemagne,” David Sapp observes the power of natural forces. With “What Home Garden,” photographer Keith Moul provides a close-up view of a...
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