The Fox

Listen

just outside the window

to the fox

whose single harsh bark

and running feet

connect the shuttered

windows of your house

to her own impenetrable burrow

under the root

in the wood

where she lives

her own incomparable life

knowing

how to travel in darkness

wait in silence

and seize

on tiny mysteries

in the grass.

Avocet: A Journal of Nature Poems XIV:3, Spring 2011

Chalice

the cap

of the acorn

empty of seed

the bowl of the hills

where the doe lies down

two hands cupped

for a trickle of water

naked

the face of rain-

hollowed granite

the orioles’ nest

windblown

vessel of  eggs

the rachis of feathers

the hollow of bone

jack-in-the-pulpit

his sermon

the spathe

of the arum

empty of words

chambers

of nautilus

caverns at sea

auricle ventricle

salt pools of the heart

the house of the skull

its cellars of memory

the eye

in its orbit

this chalice of light

Lynx XXVI:2, June, 2011

Three Songs of the Body Eclectic

1.  Ossicles

Watching the fence swift—how the rough

gray bark of his skin vanishes into the rail

while blue flanks announce his readiness

to make more of his own inestimable kind,

I am gladdened by knowing

that inside the temple of my own ear

lie humming three ancient jawbones

of this small lizard’s kin—

the chain of ossicles, ancient migrants

through the planes and valleys of my skull,

three bones tiny enough to dance

all together on the head of a pin,

and dancing now to the eardrum’s rhythm,

transmitting to my grateful brain this feather of sound—

swift feet scritching on sundrenched cedar,

a message spoken in bone and token of kin.

2.  Limbs

Fish’s fin, hippo’s hoof

and my own hand stroking

the firm gray flesh of flippers

that hide, beneath their streamlined shape,

bone for bone the bones of my open arms—

humerus, ulna, radius, thickened and stout,

finger bones lengthened and cunningly webbed

for fluid flight, spin and sea spume

and the whole curve of Earth enclosed

in the leaping dolphin’s arc, the sea-silvered

song of a mind as different and as kin

to mine as the common curves and linkage of our bones.

3.  Mitochondria

How many of you, I wonder, sluice

down the drain each time I wash my hands—

you old invaders,  now tenderly wrapped

in my own cells’ membranes and powering

my liver, kidney, lungs, the hundred thousand

daily squeezings of my heart? Your nearest kin

are named for Proteus, shape-shifting god of the sea,

slippery prophet. Could he have foreseen, I wonder,

this—panther, cuttlefish, dragonfly, me—

blithe symbiotic satchels of bacteria

at home inside our cells and there empowering

even the cauliflower convolutions of my brain,

and all of us, dear sisters, from the eel-grass to the eel,

made of the same astounding particles of matter—

live dust from ravaged stars—from which flow out

this tenuous thread of thought,

the mad illusion of the separate self,

and the charged, sea-changing pulse of wonder.

Anatomy & Etymology 1:4, November 2011

The Face Painter

So you wake up in the morning

and it’s still raining

and your life is this puddle of gray

concrete and your feet are mired

in it all day long

until you see

waltzing down the street

to his own inner music

this skinny guy with a lopsided

topknot of dreadlocks

and bell-bottoms lettered in yellow paint

Peace Harmony Love Yourself

and he opens his satchel

and takes out a dozen cakes of paint

and a little pointy brush and begins

transforming his own face—

neon pink lines swooping outward

from the corners of his eyes,

a half-moon of silver dots on each cheek,

and somehow

the concrete around your feet

begins melting into a small rainbow—

a modest little rainbow tucked away

in one obscure corner of the cosmos—

but you can dance in its radiance

and suddenly

you want to take off your concrete

mask and paint the insides

of your eyelids with sunlight—

cerulean, lavender, emerald, rose.