I will put on widows’ weeds.
Everyone will see my sorrow.
In shops, women
will purse up their smiles,
avert their eyes
from the cross-hatch

Silver Falls
State Park, Oregon

We hear it first, the roar of it,
then a glimpse through stands

of cedar fronds and maple limbs
until we see in a clearing the surge
of water pounding down.

The trail winds behind the charge,
droplets of power plunge

He asked me once if I had touched a cloud and what it felt like
and I said soft and his father said cold. And he asked if it was like bed,
like lying down, and we tried to explain that a cloud is only a collection of
tiny particles, water held together by air, a thing that you can be in and pass through
and even touch, but that you cannot hold.

first place that understood me was Oz
land of misfits, land of ne’er do wells
away from a grey and white life
Oz knew how to fix my heart me

The Airedale woke us, crashing and howling
against the door. John and I watched a coyote leap the fence,
its gold melting into the dark wood
and our hen a limp ribbon in its teeth.

The dog tracked scattered chicks

Let’s knit a shawl so the women can spend a warm winter
let’s make it of basil and thyme for the pregnant mother
and of dried corn leaves for the country girl
let’s knit a shawl to cover her shoulders
let’s do it for all the women of this storm-colored sky

Sometimes the streets turn to memory
the cities imagine others
in that distance between words
between dream and reality
stories seeking refuge

Three months gone in the wedding season
and I’d mostly been sticky. I went swimming
in the Snake River in Idaho. Got in it in Oregon
and kept still. The current pushed me back to Idaho. So
I did it again. It was good to be a strange head floating

Come back
tomorrow
when the sun
comes back
around.
I’m tired

what happens these days is what happens
for the rest of your life
the present moment clanging like
a migraine, or an alarm
going off so long you can’t hear it anymore

It’s still mosquito summer in the High Sierra
when we push up above 10,000 feet,
only Annie and me and a dryad
we come across tied forever to her foxtail pine.

She’s been sitting up here

If I encounter knife-edged voices
I will remember cool water running
in a strong stream
I will let the water be my voice.

If I encounter cold indifference

Mounds of black scat on the trail.
Rotted hemlock clawed and scattered.
A branch snaps. Forest silence shattered
by rocks knocked loose cliff-side, hail
of scree. Even birds and blackflies freeze

On her deathbed paralyzed by a stroke she broke everyone’s heart
By doing a hula with the right hand she could still move. Her eyes
Closed, her mouth locked in what might have been a smile, her hand
Held for a moment the clouds that gathered over the Ko’olaus,
Then flowed with the streams that tumbled down to the sea.

You wowed us with the horse’s neigh you taught
yourself to imitate so well that neighbors
thought we kept one in our house.

On the wall, as I remember it, a painting of a charcoal
colored horse on a pink background, a treasure

In half-shade that signifies the close
of night I see the faded quarter- moon
poised mute above the faint skyline.
A silence of birds sits in winter pine.
The stillness of the dawn is tangible.
I sense her at a distance with no color yet,

It feels like the world is coming to an end
you muse as we walk. Some twang guitar drifts
near the party we just left. You’re calm. A smile
tries itself on your lips almost convinced to land
despite such a mood. The sun is dropping its beautiful hammer

“I’ll finally get to see Marilyn” were your final
perfect words. The last of the rose petals
faded decades ago, but your torch was so primal,
never flickered. What’s it take, then? What kind of metal
turns the dregs of life into a love like that?