Old Wood

I remember how the logs fit
by some hand from long ago,
skilled beyond what my tender
paws could mete out
Sturdy for the winters, a home,
some place in the woods
where martens grin down
on you from the lofty pines
I would not say they were built to last,
not an architect among them really,
but brawny men mucking out their existence
before codes and bureaucrats,
a time when you could work the sun down
to build a life of your own and die
for no other reason than you tried

Scarlet Gilia

An excerpt from my novel Lady With Flowers

And after a moment Henry smiled when Jesse turned up to him with a question. “Only looking,” he said. “Look without thinking, without labels, without judgement, without the interference of your mind. Be alert. See the long tubes like trumpets. See how they flare into five petals. And the colour that has been said barbaric in its intensity. Rest in that colour that is red and know that it is only a word. If someone from another planet came and asked about colours and wanted to know what is red, we would say, Ah, Scarlet Gilia, of course. Gilia Aggregata. See the tiny white marks like a sprinkling of icing sugar. Listen to me without thinking. Look into the long tubes and see the filaments and anthers, the grains of pollen. Bring the lens in as close as you can. Now imagine that world of colour.”

A Tree

my favourite tree, the aspen
even the sound of it comes
clean off the tongue
and the fluttering,
trembling like a tadpole
in your hand
a fresh splash in the woods
those little hearts and flattened stems
how the breezes make love to them,
a blushing green in the gullies
and along rivers and streams
clones they say, the largest
organism in the world
but a fine tree for me
when all I want is to touch
a living thing

Hedley Cemetery

All seems forgotten down
the weedy rows of sunken graves
and tilted tombstones,
lichen creeping up the old granite
like age spots and decay and stillnes
but hallmarks of dereliction,
not a rake or tender care
in a 100 years

But there is a quiet beauty
in indifference after all,
a distilled neglect of crusty perches,
temples for the meadowlarks
fluting their warbled hymns
for my grandfather
resting there since 1940

Wild Horses

They seem wild to me,
wary as deer, ribbed and shaggy
bunches working the gullies and sidehills
All shapes and coats, squat ones
thick and able, and the summer sleek
cut from some western herd long ago,
their roving eyes alert for mares
and upstart stallions

I see them far across the ranges,
blotches of horses on hills,
hard on snakes in the spring
but no match for the cougar
that took an old-timer down
last winter - the snow was trampled
well and blood pooled darkly
where he died to feed a mountain king

The Conscious Life

The yellow moon rises,
one eye shut like the wolf
watching me through a screen of willow,
unflinching, unwavering,
wondering about my honesty
And all night long
it passes over my bed,
scrutinizes my dreams
and in the new day
I am cleansed to begin again,
released from the watcher
and glad to see a robin in a wood
But between the branches,
against the blue purity
there it is, the pale witness
like a scrape of chalk in the sky
What demands he places on me,
this hound of decency and truth
He will not relent, this I know
until I am dead or willing to listen
to the ancient mantras
that swim in his liquid gaze
He torments my inequities,
sizzles me like a good winter fire,
peels away the amicable skin
that I show to the world
He has jaws that drip
for the fat of my shortcomings
But I will appease him - one day
I will welcome him to my table
and partake in a little dessert
when I lay down with him
to sleep in the eternal thicket

Life on a Pond

I saw her come to the water's edge
and slip away, down where
the backswimmers scull

until she rose once again
and there a ripple and her
upturned nose and flagging tail

side to side and the slick
of her fine shape well suited
for rushes and tule,

flaunting it all for such tributes
until the wet slide of her mahogany back
when I asked about muskrat love