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. /