Three poems from the new collection Be-hooved :
River Stone
The stone I hold
fills my hand.
I want to tell it,
compel it,
to tell me
how to be
still within.
I feel cool rays spill
into my palm.
Not will but
willing.
Orphan Hours
Some nights, submerged leviathans,
intermittently recognized
by dorsal fin patterns,
break the surfaces of deep
marine dreams, breech,
occasioning rough wakes,
probing echolocations answered
by the hard-pounding notes
of the central organ.
~
Some nights, tined travellers
with ultraviolet-tuned eyes
recognize us dreamers
slumped under snowy sheets,
like lichens, waiting
to nourish something;
those deep blue winter eyes
see us in the dark
of our imaginings.
~
Some nights, death is just
the summer beach ice wave-stacked
between ocean, coastal plain.
Now, summer ice is not.
Eyes, memory, attest to change.
More than ice, going-going-gone.
When metaphors lose meaning
language, like any beast, becomes
endangered as a species.
~
And we are left to migrate
fluked or hooved through
dark dreams;
and we are left to our efforts
to dive or paw through
dense mediums;
and we are left to cry out
hoping to be, hoping--
to be answered.
Abiding the Cold
Cows no longer lactating, / bulls no longer sparring, / herd no longer moving, / south-of-the-tree-line-snow / easily pawed from ground lichens . . . / Northern-forest-dispersed, / the herd thrives. Fattens. /