Considering hostility
    I feel violent.
Considering wonder
    I am awed.

I heard a French widow
say that there is
someone in each of us
    who loves
and someone in each of us
    who kills.

Forget our sterile strains of green,
soft, choking lawn.

Forget our fertilizers, chemicals,
and killers.

Let our families relearn to walk
with nothing between the Earth
and their bare feet.

Let us remember the native seed.

How many have died
trying to protect their lives
from the terrible weight
of a lie
whose truth
they felt could never
be spoken?

Lit this slash pile one week ago,
a small pile as far as slashing and burning goes
Since then it’s melted,
rained, and snowed
Unusual and erratic behavior for January
and February in this country
Country that the Salish would’ve known
to move out of before winter set in.
Shouldn’t be anything other
than frozen and buried in snow
but nothing acts now in the way
it used to, and no one can predict
what’s coming, yet we keep reporting
our guesswork like we know something,
still playing make-believe with our
ideas about control, specifically about
how we’d like to be in it—
maybe because we like the idea of
stability so much and wish we had it
despite our tireless irony.


And here is this little steam-***,
this natural wonder of vitality and perseverance,
issuing one more quiet reminder
of how little we know of our actions
or the cycles they’ve started.

Jar lids pop
snow sheets slide
pitch pockets snap
water kettle groans

First light exposes
crystalline canvases
against frozen glass
the stove’s heat
melts them away
like ice Mandalas

All that is beautiful
is impermanent.

All that is unique
lives only once.

There's a sense in which
I could be anywhere—
everywhere is the same
as here.

Ghosts dance around me
and I am stepping on their toes
they curse me as I walk backwards
tracing old footprints
wishing them to come back into color,
that a familiar hand
and a smile I remember
might reach back out and ask
if I can keep a secret—
if I’d like to dance with them again?