09 Wednesday Jul 2025
As one sunflower reaches beyond the rooftop
and another suddenly aims straight northward,
enormous striped grasshoppers,
along with their small neon green brethren,
bounce every which way,
skitter piles of dry elm seedpods and creep,
sticky-like, slow, elegant and silent,
up the window frame.
They’ve been kind enough to punch countless holes
in the hollyhock leaves–
seems the Sun asked for more contact with the ground.
Kind of them to oblige…
07 Monday Aug 2023
I gave up pretty for a greater feast,
potato chips and jellybeans turned in.
Wrinkles declare descents into primal deserts,
splotches and patches and spots imprints
of the boot crush of heartbreak,
greys the stories of the non-forgotten.
Pretty hasn’t much to offer
and with it comes trails of trouble,
trials of the kind modern fairy tales
simply can’t grok.
25 Tuesday Apr 2023
A wall of slow spiraling cloud,
a great grey hand,
comes in low against the skin of the earth
swallowing the mesa,
sky, and all that proceeds it–
the West has sent its claim for the mountain.
And as first rain drops heavy and loud,
smell of December bursts full into the air,
only here, here artemisia sings strongest
not in early clutch of winter
but, like now,
in spring.
I drink desert storm
and laugh at the strangeness of time,
dusting of snow on far hills while
a flowering plum turns pink.
15 Wednesday Mar 2023
Yesterday,
I walked the streets through heavy snow,
wet lumps falling
slowly.
From across a large pasture,
a footstool of a goat, wide as long and
well-furred in big bodied apricot eruption,
ran straight to the sparse metal fence in greeting.
I stopped, realized he really was trotting over for me
and broke into laughter.
Excited to make his acquaintance, I squatted down.
He arrived, turned his butt to the fence,
tore large mouthfuls of long grass, chewed in exaggeration
and ignored me completely.
Laughing so hard I nearly fell over, I stayed.
He never did introduce himself.
06 Monday Feb 2023
Mud’s come
but you wouldn’t know it
until your foot is three inches deep.
Or, god forbid, your tire by far more.
That’s the thing about this place–
dry as the brown cracked skin lining the arroyos
but a certain season arrives
and the steady, hard, rocky road you’ve trusted
decides to gulp you and whatever force is moving you along
straight into its earthen gullet.
I can understand that kind of gluttony.
Maybe it’s best I slow down and prison-break my shoe.
06 Friday May 2022
What kind of oppression is this
for women to hate their own bodies into submission?
To tuck, flatten, cut, shape, build, color,
paint, starve, carve, feed, hide, cover, sculpt
and bind
such unique beauty and presence
to conform to something else?
For someone else?
Many are even convinced they do it
for themselves.
What, and whom, does it serve?
How long have we lied to,
hated, pushed away, contrived
and disappeared ourselves?
It goes beyond gender.
(Choose any system and look at how
we’ve turned it against ourselves.)
Ever noticed a peacock, tiger, or,
hell, a goat
do the same?
How ridiculous.
And cruel.
To what god have we bowed
when discarding the body we have been given,
one never to be created twice–not ever to be seen again–
to be wanted? appreciated? included?
Ohhhh let’s gather another tribe instead,
shake ourselves loose from those heavy chains
clamped on our wrists so long ago
we couldn’t possibly remember.
13 Monday Dec 2021
The storm is making noisy mouths of the shingles this morning,
and pom-poms of the pine’s branches.
Rain beads the panes,
droplets meet socially, gather in their weight
and river down, down towards wet ground.
A limy glow. Needles sticking long on fence, on chair,
all throughout lavender’s hair.
Yesterday at this time crows were dancing in sunrise light,
pink orange, sorbet swirl of clouds,
save one:
She sat still atop a black fir, staring.
Our four eyes, in settled bodies, soaked in the welcoming arms
of our rising Sun–
now, She knows how to begin a day.
04 Thursday Nov 2021
Tiny frog visits
at the threshold.
Years have passed since she has come.
As much time feels past since this rain.
Her throat pulses against my finger,
our skins touching,
and the gold lining her eyes gleams.
I admire her form,
the soft wetness.
We are utterly different.
Warning her of the dangers of my swinging front door
I walk her to the altar
where water and succulent,
kind attention and beauty gather.
She knows her way around.
With thanks, we part.
Until her return
in the following young morning.
31 Sunday Oct 2021
I keep checking for messages.
They aren’t there, of course.
What sends messages these days
doesn’t use the language I grew up learning.
How many languages don’t we speak because of those
we had to,
pinning words down with force for
efficiency
exactness
precision
accuracy
literalness lopping off the Song of the universe?
There is light, instead, what trees eat,
reflecting on the full belly of blood-red
garden pot,
and wind talking the leaves high,
high up the towering eucalyptus.
Clapping faeries have flitting epochs to share,
and they await those willing to listen
to languages bodies understand.
More quiet than I yet can hold
is the ear that can translate for me.
God, I know what I would like to be
in service to what is far greater~
please, show the winding way…
11 Sunday Jul 2021
When you think you are failed,
a shameful gash of a human,
misdirected, twenty years off course
and without a single storyline resembling your own
to take to your dreams, to warm a milk of recognition,
read a poem aloud to the trees.
They lean in, I swear it.
And when waters rise to your eyes
maybe your throat catches on memory
and disorientation fogs your vision,
pick up a stone, full with its permission,
and ask if it would like you to feed it the tears.
Springs of salty waters rainbowed with cares
are precious,
not to be wasted on regret.
There’s a much bigger world beyond the fears
binding you to confusion.
Cry a while with sweet words forming upon moving lips.
Walking a path others have not will wipe you out,
no need for surprise there.
It will also leave you, eventually,
soulfully
in the welcoming arms of Spirit.
And isn’t that always where you’ve wanted to be?
Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone 