This multiple-part series is from a longer work-in-progress I’ve begun that recounts my experiences in Recapture Canyon in southeast Utah. Woven throughout the longer narrative are my ideas about language’s part in evolution, culture, and relationship–including what language reveals about and how it affects the ways we treat with people who live with what I [...]
Strange vibrations, east of coal country.
Black sky, dusted by filmy cirro-nebula.
Rumbling on a trestle, high above the Green,
train whistles legend’s high, lonesome sound.
Highest water in a decade, but river’s
calmed tonight, lapping in a little cove.
Noses streaked with sunblock, bodies
with Skin-so-Soft, hair silted with residue
of a day on the water, we’re children
on the verge of adolescence, [...]
It’s been a privilege and delight for Wilderness Interface Zone to host a spectacular flourish of spring poetry during this year’s Spring Poetry Runoff. In the kick-off post, I called for a show of green language, of creative élan and prospect-opening words. I asked for poetry that contained the recombinant stuff of fertile, world-making expression [...]
While we’re teetering on the very edges of our seats gripping our arm rests watching the heated race for the Most Popular Poem Award, I have a few announcements I’d like to make.
(for Michael R.)
Michael, think of an apple, how its taste
saturates all memories of first fruit.
Probably before you grasped the word, “apple,”
a pome caught hold of you, flavor and firm body
biting through your thin skin.
Don’t you still recall “apple” by charms
more defined, more seasoned,
more round ripe than the word?
Agitation by a few grains from another blossom,
bulb [...]
Part one here.
Recently, my husband and I were in the City Market in Moab buying supplies for my special needs daughter’s formula. For fun, we sifted through the motorcycle skullcap rack, looking for a skullcap—with skulls—that my husband might like to wear in addition to the one I bought him following his recent brain surgery. [...]
One morning last summer I came up out of Crossfire carrying two objects I wasn’t carrying when I entered the canyon. The first was a fully intact turkey tail feather that I plucked from the trail. As I admired it, I noticed an oily sheen on the dark-brown barbs near the feather’s tip. I stopped [...]
It’s like the old Tarzan movies:
White hunters find their way barred
By skulls on sticks.
The Park Service has erected
A pavilion on the rim.
Beware, it says.
Quicksand. Flash floods.
How to Resuscitate Lightning Strike Victims
One warning tells.
It pretends helpful information,
But it is another white skull.
On a sideboard, the complete caveat—
A man pierced all through with sticks.
We are loath to [...]
Just as the deep snow here had melted to half-gone and I’d broken usable trails through the month-old snowpack remaining, a new storm blew in, dropped another five or six inches, and undid my hope for a winter thaw. Two more storms over the next three days are expected to fluff things up even more. [...]
Saturday night, my husband and I made a last minute run to the only grocery store within 22 miles before it closed at 9 p.m. On the return trip, I drove with the SUV’s highbeams on, because we live on a country road whereon we’re likely to come across animals on the pavement, everything from [...]