I wake after dozing and for a moment the raindrop crawling sideways across the window is a sleep-blurred nonsense. Below I see the crumpled mountain world of the Rockies folding into the Sierra Nevadas. I look over lakes of salt and brown jagged emptiness and imagine what it must have …
Throw a rock at the sea and it splashes, is gone. Even the ripples of its brief disturbance are subsumed by the endless wavelets, rolling in from now until the stuff of humans is broken down into its elements— iron, carbon, hydrogen, phosphorus— and forgotten. Still the ocean will suck …
The sun flares red across the landing strip, casting its long fingers down above mountains as I board my midnight flight leaving Anchorage, Alaska. On the 25th of May I arrived in the same airport in late afternoon. I had slept through much of the flight and woke …
Dwine – intransigent verb \ˈdwīn\ : to waste or pine away: languish – Merriam-Webster Dictionary Between the words in old sagas, between the rhyme and meter, I sense a presence—the words not said, the gods not named. I imagine these characters, the unspoken ones. One of them is called …
Winter is long. Snow, then snow on snow, darkness, cold, breathing the stale air of indoors too long— it wears you down after five months. I begin to yearn for spring in February. I remember living in southern Ireland, how February brought in early spring— if the sun was out …
It’s cold. The old house bumps and snaps all night, contracting and settling like a restless sleeper. Outside the moon casts the night in a kind of black shadowed parody of day. It’s quiet. Along the brook trees crack like gunshots. The sap expands as it freezes and splits the …
The last time I went looking for dragons and wrote of it here, it was early spring. There was a sense of decayed things emerging, then being overgrown, sublimated into green watercress. This time it’s winter, things are buried. The snow has come. It came late this year, the time …
It’s as if the mushrooms’ folded world has its own colour spectrum, warm and dark; brown, orange, red and yellow, a shiver of green in the darkness of a decaying log. Trees curve over the steep valley, grey barked, zigzagging the distant sky. This is a house of trees, earth …
The forest king’s son hides in plain sight, the colour of dry spruce bark and fallen needles. How long must the spruce tree and frog have lived side by side to match each other’s skins? Down by the dry August riverbed, in the dark hollow, tree stumps watch …
“Turning tides, their regularities! What is the heart, that it ever was afraid, Knowing as it must know spring’s release, Shining heart, heart constant as the tide?” – Seamus Heany [from the dutch of J.C. Bloem (1887-1966)] High wind cut cold North Atlantic water in tattered edged …