More on: nature

Lord of worn stone cliffs and the guileless trill          of the canyon wren; Lord of stunted hemlocks, imperiled mussels, seeds that fall on shallow soil;          Lord of boreal forests, of the fragile nitrogen cycle, of vanishing aquifers, spreading          deserts; Lord of neglect and…

Sister storm, hurling your javelins too near our window, don’t you care if in darkness, we splinter like a bright waterfall, if we catch fire from the sparks you send flying from the grindstone of night? You have cracked our sky with lightning; you have made glass pitchers of our bodies and poured our spirits…

El Niño slips across latitudes, rises dripping from the ocean From seafloor mud, El Niño brings up the secrets of childhood El Niño crawls in the manger, time runs out El Niño rocks himself dry on the edge of a continent Prairies of wheat go unpollinated, there is rumor El Niño is killing the honeybees…

  The Corpse Flower: New & Selected Poems by Bruce Beasley (University of Washington Press, 2007) Mary’s House: New & Selected Poems by David Craig (Idylls Press, 2007) Some Heaven by Todd Davis (Michigan State University Press, 2007) Apropos of Nothing by Richard Jones (Copper Canyon Press, 2006)   IS THERE a contemporary Christian poetic aesthetic? This question came…

What can the sky say, waiting for the sun, which may or may not come, the leafless trees, unless I speak for them, their waiting deep as tap roots’ cold, suspended burrowing? I can always write another poem but I am tired of speaking of the world. If he wants a spring poem, let the…

Even the kids negotiating friendships on that yellow school bus racketing past know it’s a different scenario every day, not just the same elemental hostilities like ocean versus sand, tough places to make a living. To see things as they are, keep your eyes open. This morning on the bay side of Egg Island I…

WE ARE ROCKETING through the steppes into the eye of the setting sun. To the east of us, the great thrusting shoulders of the Tian Shan, or “Celestial Mountains,” are burnished with the deep rose gold you see on icons from the Sinai or tanka paintings from Nepal. According to local lore, deep within the…

  My knights and my servants and my true children, which be come out of deadly life into spiritual life, I will now no longer hide me from you, but ye shall see now a part of my secrets and of my hid things. ———————————————————————–—Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur THE AVIATOR HAD BEEN HEARING…

like a slap, like a bone, like a spice, like a thought gone still in the light, another kind of sorrow, a kind of life, a cheek stroked, then freckled. Its rhythm amounts to injury, to a small space. No singing. Just a sack of air, a soiled shirt, more sermonizing that picks away at…

Like a dark miracle, they sleep, two am at a truck stop outside Indianapolis; my husband of three cities, three years— flycatcher, scrub jay, kingfisher; our baby daughter, little chickadee, pale wrinkle, my inkling. A motherless girl who now mothers, I am loved twice, two orchids, two glimpses of the afterlife, two clear-wing butterflies, two…