Wilderness Interface Zone

Deep in the sugar-blossomed orchard
spring catches in the throat of each bloom
pink with nectar promises
heavy with buzz of bees
dreaming honey-laden fruit to come
this ancient cherry tree
beckons with shade
a dusty wanderer who
turns from roadside Jiffy Mart
leaves billboard clutter
and afternoon sales calls behind
climbs the paint-peeled fence
that separates this holy of holies
from hum and drum of market-
driven life
to [...]

1 John 4:16
What the river knows, it keeps
beneath ephemera of foam,
far below pull of eddies and currents,
beneath its bed
and into its cold dark heart,
though from the watershed
we can see
how it harbors fish and lamprey,
feeds swallow and raven,
slakes thirst of sheep and wolf,
all haphazard,
how it floods thirsty fields,
or careless withers into a parched arroyo,
how it goes [...]

When God stood behind me,
I would have liked a shoulder rub.
Instead,
He gave me showering light,
Rabbit dens,
Trees that turn the color of eyes,
And that sweet home hearth feeling.
That feeling you can fall asleep to on the rug,
While listening to Rachmaninoff on a Sunday evening.
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To read Tod’s bio and more of his poetry go here.

Wilderness Interface Zone would like to thank participants who made our Love of Nature, Nature of Love Month such a pretty thing this time around.  The list includes:
Karen Kelsay
Jonathon Penny
Tyler Chadwick
Lou Davies James
Judith Curtis
Michael Lee Johnson
You all helped WIZ celebrate love and nature with heart and high style.  Thanks so much.
Also, thanks go to our [...]

Yep, this review probably contains spoilers.  Also, because its themes address directly environmental issues, I’ve given it a more thorough critical treatment than I gave The Charge at Feather River. Thanks in advance for taking the time to read it.  Finally, this movie contains intense battle scenes and a frightening pirate villain, either of which [...]

When Lily plays the cello, it is holy.
Like lavender that strays from garden walls
and necklaces of evergreens that slowly
curl across the meadows, along the halls
her wreath of somber notes is softly borne.
She wings the bow; I hear my mother’s voice,
recall a lover’s crying flame. I mourn
and then, with silent chanting tongue, rejoice.
Each memory is coaxed [...]

Warning: As usual, this Retro Review may contain spoilers.
Don’t be fooled: Despite its somewhat predictable cavalry v. Indians plot and the flaming arrows shot directly at the audience to showcase the movie industry’s earliest 3-D special effects, The Charge at Feather River is about relationships—between misfit soldiers and their leaders, between rivals for a woman, [...]

Keep your craggy, up-thrust mountain peaks!
Your chasms and your cliffsides roughly made
From clattering and shattering of plates
In the devil’s galley by some shade!
I’ll have my soft-edged tinder coulee view,
Tan and green, and gently, supply formed
Like mother earth was always thought to be:
Green-crowned, or seascape prairie grass adorned,
Our traces nestled, sheltered, on her knee.
There’s hope in [...]

It’s funny how things look
From however many thousand feet
One has to be to sail on clouds and see no birds.
And when the clouds burn off, I find a charm in streets—
Their random pass, the patchwork of man’s world,
The green and brown space, the plaid or checkered shirt,
The crawl of hills as if topography encroached on [...]

Self portrait with closed eyes
like a brumal serpent
listening to Earth
shed her crystalline
skin, slip off her chill
at dawn’s seductions
supple as hibernacula
warm with bodies
slendering into instinct
and appetite—Eden’s
infinite metaphors
sidled up to God’s breast,
areola iron on the tongue,
milk rich from desire’s simmer
and slow burn, the flame
set low so not to sear the soul
still this side of vision, lurking
like the [...]