Just after dawn the air was sweet

and a warm wind came up along the ridge.

Towards the end of summer,

holding fast.

Glancing back down the path

at one of my home-spots, soon to be lost.

Looking out

to where the river runs into the sea, and I am flying through that opening.

Random beauty

scattered through the summer days.

Cocooned

In the dream

you came out of the water and wind, unannounced.

When the wind blows in from the sea

it brings more than a change in the weather.

The scent of water,

the scent of life on this planet.

Some days,

perfection is close at hand.

Crazy hot :

go jump in the river.

How this story unfolds

Just a sixtieth of a second

Leaning backwards into cool water,

into the summer afternoon.

Close your eyes and recall the arch of your neck backwards, the way water holds you,
the bright opening in the center of your heart.

Portraits are a great mystery to me

and when there are two people it's even more unpredictable, more hypnotic.

Coming up on the solstice

As if it were another time, another country--

and a story half-remembered.

Deshabille

 

Sentimental:

More than I know

Travelling so fast

the hours dissolve into a memory of color, of wind coming over the ridge.

Transformation:

happening daily.

This dream of music

Always more questions

A new road is a wonderful thing

Lush, tender,

ambrosial.

Ghost flowers--

aromatic, many petalled--the last blooms I see as the dark comes on.

It was like this---

a burst of flowers next to a bright river, a handful of days for thinking and writing.

I woke up next to this river

after listening to the water all through my dreaming.

Over time, we grow more dear

 to one another, and our vision of each other becomes subtle and varied, 

at rest in a constellation of days together; we begin to see 

each other through a veil of uncountable hours, unnumbered nights.

In May, I wake to roses

and dream of summer all night long.

Lilacs as reminder,

and remedy.

Another spring sky

and we're all drunk on spaciousness.

Who can measure time

under such a sky?

The real season of joy

The good news is I feel it all; the bad news: exactly the same. In the winter, 

I find myself longing to hibernate, at odds with the demands of the 24/7 world. But in spring 

and summer, the happiness I know is inexpressible--a kind of delirious love overtakes me. 

Unravelling

Nested

Walking between the sea and the sky

The wind as her breath

Whenever I walk through tall grass---whether it's the dunes close to the sea 

or the dry hills out east, it seems that this grass is the fur of some huge animal 

who carries me without complaint, who bears my small weight with patience.

The privilege of being here together

A girl and her dog

Four days after the equinox

and dusk takes a little longer to dissolve into darkness; the air is full of familiar scents 

and every few feet I find myself entering still another memory of another spring.

The ten thousand sorrows, the ten thousand joys:

My sister has a farm:

I fall somewhere in between

I like the way my Mom and my niece seem to share an understanding of the world while 

I float somewhere in between them, feeling neither young nor quite ready to be old. 

The afternoon was a movie that went on and on, the film never slipping off the reel.

Clutter surrounds us

and some days are long and exhausting but there's also the light

that falls on my girls and the dozen or so dun-colored birds who flit 

through the pine, shaking the needles with another sort of brightness.

Sometimes, we go way out of town

What we uncover and what we hide