for Wol When our children ask how we met, I’ll tell them about the fork in the river, where a carpenter called James found flakes of gold. I’ll tell them this all happened long ago, before Great-grandmother was even born, and how the story passed from mouth to mouth to bind a seam around the […]
PNWinter14
Smith
Though other boys would follow flocks and herds, some forage food along the muddy shore, I knew the narrow doorways into dark, could weigh dull stones, judge mysteries of ore. Others were learning how to ride, to fight, while I was studying to work with fire, to conjure out of earth those glowing threads, watching […]
The Guest
l’ll never know who he was, the man that just sat there his face pressed into the head rest, his beard a black avalanche. He sat there in the way piles of gravel do, delivered to the beginning of a drive, one ear folded like a landscape Christmas card, one eye a red foil bauble […]
6 a.m.
This light – too heavy for mere sky to contain – yet somehow each leaf of poplar, beech, ash and oak balances a bar of bullion effortlessly upon its tip.
Gold Song 9
First before nothing was zero; that dark space a gap; the first baby could sing it; surprise at the brightness; the blackbirdsoaked morning; the lips a round gurgle; the first cry a tickle; turned into a flood. First cry was waiting for round lips to soften; the well up; surprise at the full stop. The […]
Portrait of the Mother as a Pitcher
Today I will offer up daffodils. I will put all thought of milk aside. Today I am not a container for warmth and nourishment. This may be the start of what happens next: the spring of green stems from my belly and my reaching hands like those of a gold goddess, open and many.