Addison County

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ice recedes the solid white pocks, goes white to gray gray to film to puddled puddled to lace between river rock bottom & ice top a melt hole grows a dark space shows cold winter air ice above, water below silent ice loosens to chortling water yellow pebb…

the river ice is half gone, a white field punctured by dark holes lace edged, daily longer & wider thick slabs undercut with melt shallow chuckling water ripples over yellow stones, rubs & rives at fallen trees, worn boulders invisible fish, & newts, frog…

four wild turkeys swashbuckle & bob thru deep snow where from?

the two gray squirrels might be puppet strung bound bound bound halt on two back feet nose at ice-furred snow survey stubbled field bound bound bound

driver door wide open, someone piles bricks on the gas pedal, turns the key, pops the clutch, & dives sideways into dry dirt, gravel, weeds while the car shoots forward & tips down the slope, bounces off rocks & carves divots in trees, whump crackle, metal

in one liminal patch I find Morchella americana twenty-two morels such labyrinthine folds & Arisaema triphyllum a jack-in-the-pulpit its folded-over hood still hiding its striped interior they emerge beside dread invasives — garlic mustard, dame’s rocket —

I listen three nights when a creature not one of the three of us prowls the dark until one morning a scratch, a scrape becomes my cat carrying a mouse the tail dangles a white neck shines the cat trots outside my other cat follows the end is a different s…

the burden of driving the hundred miles to visit friends or family, to consult on a project — that length of time, those dangerous roads — so one stays home, looks out the same windows onto the same trees, grass, driveway, road yet what comfort the known…

the morning after my high school graduation a moving van pulls up out front of our New Jersey house United!

yes, we too suffer while we watch & tend to the old & ill tend them when they know & we know it’s end game they tremble, dribble, moan embarrass & soil themselves still, we don’t deliver the dose are we making them pay for what they’ve done to us?

I am in paradise not banished but instead where I would most wish to be because of fragments I live outside the outer world inside my own world though I don’t knit I’m knitting . . . long ago I wove my body my loom

the sussuration of S iffiness of a short I strength & resilience of an L scissor snip of a K silk blouses always pretending to slide off my shoulders silk blouses & trousers I gave away when I threw off the salaryman slog & moved to Hawaii off grid, forty…

I am hallucinating the out of doors because I am inside until further notice every window in my house brings me light, bare trees, snow on the ground indoors is this ugly aluminum walker in my lap a book about taking the walks Henry David Thoreau took . .…

she tells me about a boy who comes to school filthy — clothes, skin, hair — I mean filthy, she says I wonder, does he never wash?

every Palestinian child killed is someone I will never know you might say I wouldn’t know them anyway because before they’d have grown I’ll have died, & yet we might have exchanged fleeting gusts of air, theirs blown here from Rafah in Gaza, mine blown th…

Ovid’s creation story is so predictably male — natus homo est — I expect Ovid saw homo as a white Roman male, a norm from which other colors & genders deviate.

November days I scour the woods for windfall, blowdown . . . young trees the high winds tore or toppled, old trunks not yet rotted into fresh earth, uprooted white pine, its bark gone, pale dry limbs I snap off, drag & carry, align & pack down twigs & lim…

I grasp the thorny-stalked, lobe-leafed plants near their base & yank up the roots, shallow & widely branched they leap from the soil, a wad of tangle no flowers, no fruit, too many thorns sheath all but the oldest stalks, thorns eager to snag my skin when

759 species identified more than 300 species extinct they cannot travel backward their shells are already fossils snails emit & follow slime preferably slime of kin or friend Hawaiians hear snails sing a sound like crickets maybe it’s the sound of wind cr…

the wait staff sets checkered tables with salt pepper, ketchup, napkins, & a loaf of white bread what we called Wonder Bread when I was a child the loaves are sealed in plastic, & we never open them, never eat a slice, but work crews do as do ginormous fat

my brother dug a deep, then deeper hole the backyard hole to nowhere what kind of a family allows for that kind of hole?

two states choose to execute two convicted men perhaps they did wrong, perhaps they did no wrong twenty plus years in prison means nearly every cell in the men’s bodies has been replaced three times their bodies remake themselves yet can’t shed their crim…

a framed pencil sketch hangs cattycorner from my crib an amateur’s rendering of a hand, a baby’s head, a wrist someone thought the execution good enough to frame, good enough to hang in a baby’s room parts of a baby for the baby ivory paper, smudged gray…

a sawdust-clotted web an earwig’s fractured corpse one sawzall a halftone below the other explains what cannot be explained the idea that humans are gods witness this wheelchair pope colonizer, predator peel back his whited robe shrive him, skin alive him…