She smiled as she placed the bread
between us.
The crust was dark, still warm
from the oven, and the smell of yeast
filled her small kitchen.
 
She poured salt onto a wooden plate.
Outside, winter leaned on the windows,
knocking at the glass.

The trees bent in the wind.
Inside was warm with her burning
candles.
I watched her hands carefully.
Flour had rested in the lines of her skin.
 
She broke the bread slowly.
The sound felt louder than the storm
outside.
She gave me the larger piece, and
I almost cried at that.
 
Not because it was much.
Because it was all she had.
She nodded to me, and I dipped the
bread into salt.
It tasted like tears.
 
For a while, we ate in silence.
The room smelled of smoke,
tea leaves, and fresh bread.
No rich meal sat before us.
Only bread and salt.
 
The hunger I had was gone,
And I couldn’t feel the cold anymore.
She smiled at me before she spoke
with her soft voice,
“You are home tonight.”

Dawn's rosy fingers creep out from the horizon,
stealing over the bushveld
while the birds sing their welcome;

they have been chattering for hours but
I am not yet quite awake.
I sip my coffee, watch the river,
wait.

Three elephant bulls splash across,
heedless of the crocodile who floats upriver,
masquerading as a log.

The elephants lumber across the veld, trunks swaying,
ears flapping, wearing water-painted tights—
rather formal for breakfast in the bush.

The skittish impala scatter at the elephants' coming;
they pull down branches, eating on the move,
leaving broken foliage in their wake.

Breathless, I watch them amble by, forgetting the coffee, 
the cold, everything,
in the desire to stretch out my hand
as they pass the verandah.

They do not stop,
do not even glance my way,
and when the bush is quiet again,
I taste the salt of tears.

Looking around I catch the tiny life about me
all moving into a single experience. 
 
There. A plump bumblebee dipping into the flowering privet,
its petite white blooms.
 
And over there a bird of solid gray hopping along the stone wall. 
Chipmunks scurrying about the wheelbarrow by the barn.  
 
I am taken by small things that are in dire need of respect. 
They teach us something. They know things much larger than their size. 
 
And the sun. There is that too, of course. I must thank its light. 
How it widens over us making everything lit
 
making us see exactly what we do 
and do not want.

 

My toes throb over
hard pebbles. Waters slip
over slim ankles. Should I stand
shivering or go swim?
Lose my footprint?
 
Off I run, falling over myself
a mug of salty cider. This
wave an insecure bed.
Seaweed pillow. Carried by
moon to an abyss.
 
The floor of my mansion is
not tidy. I shall have sponges
for lunch. Ride with seahorses
perhaps.
 
On the far shore, my gigantic lover
smiles, kisses of surf. We tread
soft waters while sunshine
dresses us in golden sequins.

For Nancy
 


Outside my office window, daylight with its stony silence
suffuses the sidewalk. Yesterday, a work crew
 
with their rope and chainsaws brought down a live oak. 
How empty, such nothingness, where for decades
 
we had watched toward thoughtfulness a beautiful chaos 
of leaves, long limbs. Into music they’d shape the shadows,
 
into a composition birds could sing while, softly, day fell
into dusk and dark. The songs, perhaps, float elsewhere now.

In late September, Charles took a trip out to Oregon again. The memories had been tightening in his stomach all summer. He booked a plane and rented a Subaru and headed up the long highway to the Three Sisters Wilderness, hoping that a few days alone in the woods could help untie the knot of pain and remembrance. 
 
Along the western slopes of the Central Cascades stretched miles of unbroken forest, majestic stands of Douglas-fir and mountain hemlock. As the highway climbed higher, angular talus slopes pierced through the green expanse at intervals, and over the ridges to the south rose Mount Washington and Mount Jefferson, masked with snow.
 
Charles drove up Foley Ridge Road and turned into a gravel lot beside a scrubby patch of grass. He pulled his backpack from the trunk and went over the contents: sleeping bag, tent, stove. Extra clothes and freeze-dried meals. Compass. Charles threw the backpack on and pulled a permit from the National Forest box. Soon he was climbing switchbacks along the mountainsides with mellow morning sunlight dusting the canopy of conifers. 
 
His mind roamed over lost emotional ground, churned through the past in search of a puzzle piece from his childhood. The fragments flitted in and out of his consciousness as he walked. He thought of his dad. The last few nights, in the hospital, by the bed. The relentless glare of the vital signs monitor. Decisions and farewells. Charles felt as if he'd always been behind that gigantic pack on the old man's back, always trailing behind.
 
He paused for breath and glanced ahead. The trail ascended through a deep calm of hemlock and spruce. Charles struggled to recognize it: was this the same trail? The same corner of wilderness? The previous year, he and his dad had so much difficulty finding water. Now the streams overflowed with snowmelt; golden carpets of buttercup and balsam-root sprouted in the soft light beneath broken stands of fir. Vibrant, teeming, lush.
 
Four miles in, he passed over the last section of Foley Ridge and dipped into Separation Meadow. His father had adored this spot. A cold narrow stream ran through the tall grass, cutting through columbine, larkspur, and crowded clumps of yarrow. Charles found the campsites at the meadow's edge, and dropped his pack in a flat spot circled by pines.
 
After kicking away loose pine needles, he hammered aluminum stakes into the soil, carefully avoiding tree roots, and slid the tent poles into the shelter and tossed the rain fly over, fastening it to each corner with guy lines. With the water filter tucked under one arm, he followed the rounded stream as it crept through the meadow. Flowing patterns pulsed over loose rocks, the rivulets ran clear and bright. Drooping wood-reed and dense clumps of lilies guarded the creek. He dropped the floater in a shallow spot, almost an indentation in the grass, and began to pump, watching as water meandered up the hose into the pale orange Nalgene bottle. The bottle grew heavy and cold with snowmelt, and Charles held it tighter, protectively, as if the water were a living thing.
 
The sun was vanishing behind the ridge. Charles pulled on an insulated jacket, rolled the sleeping bag under his arm and followed a game trail to a sandy spot downstream from the campsite. He spread out the sleeping bag on a strip of dark pebbles and slid inside. The tent stood behind him at a distance of fifty yards. As the sky darkened, Charles realized he was too exhausted to do anything but stare, thoughtlessly, in front of him. Under the waning sunlight, he finally closed his eyes and began to drift off.

 
*  *  *
 

The next morning, he awoke shivering and soaked with dew. Swiping matted hair from his eyes, he sat up, still wrapped in the sleeping bag. He blew on his hands. The ridges glowed pink with sunrise. 
 
Across the meadow came the plopping and burbling sounds of wet boots in mud. Charles watched in surprise as a white-bearded man marched forward, flanked by a pair of donkeys, noses twitching in the cold morning air.
 
The man waved from the other side of the creek. "Hey! Good morning!" He brought the two animals forward on long braided reins, pausing on a strip of frozen white grass.
 
Charles straightened and waved back. He shifted against a large slab of rock to get a better look. The man was massively built, with a rounded upper back, and thick powerful legs like the stumps of virgin old-growth. On his head was a tangle of white hair, wild as a blizzard.
 
"Beautiful morning!" the man continued, coming up from the creek with the pair of donkeys not far behind, plodding along at the end of their reins. Dark dorsal stripes ran down their brown backs and intersected with thick shoulder markings, like a crucifix. Their large ears drew back now and then as the wind picked up.
 
"I'm Mike. Started in southern Oregon, headed all the way to Hood River."
 
"Nice to meet you, Mike. I'm Charles."
 
"A pleasure. You can call me the Hulk, by the way. That's what they call me in Colorado. I'm a big guy. Slow and old. Not so green anymore, though," he grinned. "You come up from Foley Ridge?"
 
"Just yesterday," said Charles.
 
"May head there myself," the Hulk said. "But look at this place: what beauty! The chemistry, the physics of life, of being alive!" He pointed at the yarrow and lilies alongside the stream, then closed his eyes, raised his nostrils: "You can smell the flowers everywhere!"
 
Charles nodded, and noticed how the colors were brightening with the sunrise.
 
"Where are you headed?" the Hulk asked.
 
"Obsidian Lake."
 
"Ah, yes. God's country. Wonder if there's enough grass for these guys?" he said, nodding in the donkeys' direction.

Charles shrugged. "I haven't been there since last year. It was one of my dad's favorite places."

"I'd head in that direction, if there's grass, of course. I brought these guys with me," the Hulk said, looking again at the donkeys, "because I had nobody who'd take care of them. Drove a trailer from Colorado. Now we're going three, maybe four miles a day at most. Slow and old. But it's nice to share this with them." He paused, then continued, clearing his throat a little: "You mentioned your dad..."

"Passed away. Melanoma."

With a glance at the black ridge, the Hulk's chest rose and fell with deep slow breaths, as if he were trying to inhale the entire landscape. A crisp gust of wind caught his hat's brim, and from the east came a distant clap of thunder. The donkeys paced nervously, eyes swiveling forward, alert.

"I'm sorry," he said. "This must be hard for you."

"Melanoma," Charles repeated, barely aware of his own voice. "Doctors found a spot on the shoulder, and it spread."
 
Clouds cracked at the edge of the ridge, and the air grew heavy. The Hulk pulled the animals a bit closer. The donkeys kicked their legs, started braying, and the Hulk turned to Charles, meeting his eyes for a moment.
 
"It's a strange journey, isn't it?" the Hulk said at last. "The physics of it all." He glanced upward. "Storm coming later today, looks like."
 
Charles shut his eyes, and when he opened them again, he saw the Hulk leading the two donkeys away from the creek, along the faint trail. The old man raised a single hand in goodbye, without turning around. The sunrise illuminated the meadow's edge, and Charles sat against the rock and watched until the Hulk was a mere pinpoint, a dark speck in the snow's glare.
 
Masses of clouds sprawled in the east. Charles knew the storm would soon pass, that a few good days of hiking remained before the weekend, before boarding another plane and heading back home to the city. Tomorrow he would camp near Obsidian Lake as the sunrise modulated to sunset. He'd kneel by the lilies and clammy moss, feeling the chemistry of beauty, the physics of being alive.

grass blades
shredding the sun
on a ladybug 
 


fallen hydrangea
looking around
for its bloom



dahlias
leaping over
the roadside hedge



cloud light
a wave of cedars
about to break



winter sun
the shadow of a rose
on a blue wall

The book says
the marriage bed is sacred.

Even with
pilled sheets,
drool-marked pillows,
a crumpled quilt on the floor.

But sacred—

the topmost branch
of a white pine,

the soft underbelly
of an otter,

Indian paintbrush
burning in a field,

the rush of deep beach sand
through my fingers—

not this bed

bent sunflower
that big toothless grin
towers over us
 


blackberry bramble
the beetles already had
their fill



former mining town
coneflowers feed
the goldfinches


 
fish and chips
the scent of garden dirt
on my fingers

 

family graves
on the mountain’s east side
a weathered lamb

I have an addiction to wildflowers.
The bud I sniff,
the petals I fondle,
are my caffeine.
 
More than an addiction.
I’m outright jealous
of the stamen
that bolsters such 
beguiling beauty.
 
Yes, there are times
I’d prefer to be one of many
in this cluster,
the spinal column
to a lanceolate, toothed face.
 
And I’ve an obsession with breezes,
how, for all their infiltration,
they content themselves
with merely fluttering
the loveliness around them. 
 
As for the surrounding grasses,
I’ve no wish to be a blade,
but I welcome the company.
I lie down on their greenness,
fade in the head,
fade in their stalks, 
a custodian of sorts
with the dreams of an enabler.

August brings your birthday—
missing from calendars,
mostly forgotten.

A wisp of a day gone
before anyone notices.
Birthdays call for cake, candles,
bright paper,
tissue lifting like gulls.

But yours passes quietly—
a white owl sweeping through dark woods,
gone before she is seen.

And in the hush after,
the trees remember her,
shaking out their leaves
like whispers she will never hear.

One Fourth of July, the city held 
a pre-dawn fireworks display,
giving onlookers a brief pocket of time
to marvel at the fanfare.
 
But fireworks require true night
to work their magic.
The darkest firmament deepens contrast,
unlike a sky stippled with first light.
 
Dawn diffuses fireworks’ magic too soon.
 
Whether it lies in the pageantry of color and sound
or in its seeming endlessness,
night’s paintings—as with all things ethereal—
are best savored 
without fear of midnight ending too soon.
 

I look for marks,
for a bruise that 
opens like a flower
under the skin.
 
Nothing.
 
You turn 
your head away,
making your cheek
a flat plane.
 
What shadow picture
should I make
on the reflective wall 
of you?
 
One afternoon 
of rain, and all
the tulips blaze:
their petals tongue
the air, demanding
distance.
 
As in any dream,
I am there, I am
this close.
 
Again
you turn.
 
Again I fold
my lungs up
so as not
to fan
the flame.  

The tree that sheltered me
 these past years,
 
whose name I have not 
yet deigned to learn, 
 
who stands beside me in morning light, 
companion 
 
to my every day, who whispers when breezes                     
kiss her leaves,
 
that tree, this morning, has undone me, 
brought me to some sense, some solace.                                     
She has honored me, for I saw today, 
as I have not before,
 
her gentle sway, her slow dance, the tiny
moves of leaf and stem, 
 
a woman grown well into her prime, her dress, 
a gauzy green, billowing in the wind. 
 
I saw too, her patient, lilting breath 
as she exhaled,
 
let go that source she draws from earth
and I grew still, was made to marvel—
 
saw at last, her sacred, sentient soul.

The old man built a fountain
in a backyard on Long Island,
an immigrant’s handiwork 
of found stones and cement.
And yet, at the turn of a faucet, water flowed. 
After his shift at the foundry, my grandfather
would retire to a plastic chair and the shade
of a pussy willow, ear tuned to the gurgling
of water over stone and a robin’s refrain.
His patch of paradise, never mind 
the steaming asphalt, the drone
of commuters hurtling east on the expressway.
He was far away, seated in the garden
of his boyhood home, a tenant farm in Avellino,
collared doves calling from oleander trees,
a basket of perfect oranges on his knee,
juice running from his lips.

The last leaf falls from the maple tree and hits nothing on the way down. I float with its shape and imagine the cool, cold ground where it lands. We sat right there on the porch next to the maple tree for forty years. Doves forming on the power line, mocking coos and hoos to each other and collecting sticks that look like people. Her shoes are still outside by the porch swing, collecting frost. My imagination does the rest and fills in the shape of her body. Lithe, tall, dark. My wife.
 
I recall a night when we sat out front, and the air was thick and a half with summer, wet in a different way that year. She threw a finger in the wind. “Remember this song?” she asked.

Of course. I nodded.

“You wore that crazy getup.” She smiled. “That fur thing, always wet with that gross cocktail you used to make.”

“My specialty cocktail, you mean.” I said. She liked the way I teased her. Her eyes rolled all the way around, and I cradled her shrinking body that had once pooled with vitality, surged with life. She took a sip of her medicine from a tiny plastic cup. It looked like it could break. “Would you have done anything differently?” I asked.

The wind changed direction. No. She shook her head. Skinny hair with a body that didn’t work anymore. Still, the moonlight shone. A few seconds and she would slip away somewhere. Her whole body—eyes, mouth, skin, under a glaze. I don’t know where she would go in those moments; I wished I could have been with her in them. Her eyes returned, vacant for a second, then the song changed in the background. 

“Suzanne!” she shouted before I could hear the first note. Classic. It was her favorite on the album. A good one. 

“You’ve never been scared of a damned thing in your whole life,” I said to her.

She tilted her head. “That so?”

The magnolias breathed out to touch us with their scent. They would die soon, but it took me to the night of her sister's wedding, where we danced in the garden until four in the morning with our shoes off. “Let’s get you to bed,” I said. “Finish your drink, will ya?” 

She chugged it like a beer then let it drip down her chin. “Strong stuff!” she joked. 

Hit with affection, I chugged mine too, my tea. To be in her world. What a thing. I nuzzled my beard all over her face. Her laugh cut the sky in two. We shuffled back inside, me first, to hold the drapes and open the sliding doors. I knew then that soon, no one would follow, but for the time being, there were still stars in the sky.
 
Still, when I see sticks on the ground, tossed randomly from the trees, I laugh. They look like her. Earthy, salt of the world, strong, but at the same time, thin. She used to say, everything’s random, everything’s a coincidence. I keep thinking about that.

laughing
the feather across her face
spring clean
 


sea and sky
one shade
summer
 
 

rising light
the sun’s first steps
into autumn

 

night walk
faint echoes of the past
returning tide
 


sun’s touch
on the warm tide
morning glory



in a meadow
words too
bloom

a bird’s long glide measures
the stance of trees 
prominence of crags
altitude of islands
 
in catenary curve it drops
and rises again each wingbeat
a coin in nature’s economy
one hundred twelve bones
 
pneumatic as constellations
crane, crow, dove, eagle, swan
ten thousand uncharted miles
five years at sea in albatross time
 
moonlight the first language
plumed aeronaut 
mapping the edges of shadows
angle, turn and swoop of pen
 
what can be written of oceans
by sine and cosine of wing
from sand-scooped down-clad nest
veiled in vesper’s darkening blush
 
what aching voice shall rise, soar, set
to warn the air:
ten thousand nights of rising seas
home a fissure in the echo of darkness