More on: nature

The kingdom of my kitchen invites one snail to measure a carrot peel with the full length of her body. Of Christ and necessity this snail says nothing. The celery shines. By morning, my countertops, my floor will glisten with the star road of her meanderings. It measures a universe of dark and light in…

for William Christenberry Some people have told me that this subject is not the proper concern of an artist or of art. On the contrary, I hold the position that there are times when an artist must examine and reveal such strange and secret brutality. It’s my expression and I stand by it. ——————————W.C. I.…

The following is adapted from the commencement address for the Seattle Pacific University Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing delivered on August 7, 2010. THIS PROGRAM IS blessed to have its intensive, ten-day residencies at two of the most beautiful places on the continent: the high desert of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and…

The leaves on the lawn are brown. Beneath them, the wet ground. Beneath them, the silver roots. Beneath them, the darkness. Given the chance to change, you hold on, the fist a clenched bulb. Last year’s tulips come up again, smaller, shorter, failing— the stunted stem a symptom. The rain tastes like copper, an old…

Even so the peaches are ripe, their pelts cat’s tongue to my touch. Even so the fierce poppies tremble. Even so every night a dense blue like cold stones in my mouth. Even so death rides the air, flitting and veering like bats, brushing my outstretched arms, in passing. Even so I dreamed the dream…

From The Parables of Mary Magdalene It is like a single cherry tree, surrounded with fences and growing in an orchard of cherry trees. The fruit of the one tree is no redder or less red than the other trees’ fruit. Where its bark has cracked, sap oozes out, forming amber beads that harden in…

How many minutes does it take a gut-shot buck to helter-skelter through scree and lose the hunter? How many days for turkey vultures to convert death into gliding? How many years till some schlub hiker like me stumbles upon the remains? There it lay— a tableau in bleached bone, flight and collapse converted into sleep.…

He will burrow and gallop, buffalo the prairie again, penguin the unhatched egg, then sleep off centuries of miracles with the three-toed sloth. What a magician, one minute pirouetting among banks of cumulus, the next grazing underground cafés with the star-nosed mole. Out of caves, from under bridges, a million translations of a single verb,…

THE LORD GOD BIRD fled its home on the Singer Tract in the bayou of Louisiana in 1944 and hasn’t been conclusively seen or heard from since. Its official name is the ivory-billed woodpecker. Campephilus principalis. The bird was the largest woodpecker in America until its purported demise. Great God, people were known to say.…

A weaver, this spider, she plays her eight thin black legs and their needle-nail toes across the threads faster, more precisely, than a harpist at concert can pluck the strings in pizzicato. Although blind at night, she nevertheless fastens a thread to a branch of chokecherry on one side of the path, links it to…