Spirit Guide
After a painting by Linda Armantrout

The dream will never tell us
    what the big basket holds,
        balanced on the head
    of this ghostly woman
standing naked like a Lady
    of the Beasts brushed
        onto a craggy cavern wall
    by some mud-streaked acolyte.
Just so, the colors haloing her

    soften and mist together
        as one dream or one species
    bleeds into another. Through
her dreaming skin, we see
    a man in a violet jacket;
        from the center of his chest

    a milky water gushes,
plunging into the cradle
    of her pelvis. Could this be
        the magic we’ve been called
    to ponder? This heart-surge
into “that dark center
    where procreation flared”?
        Without it, the lapis blue
    zebra in the distance

couldn’t graze so calmly
    at the prairie’s edge,
        nor could that lone eagle,
    wheeling above the scene,
trust the wind to lift him high
    into the light of our mind’s eye.

Editor's Note:  Thanks to Linda Armantrout for letting me publish the image of her painting.  To see more of her work, visit her website: http://www.armantroutstudio.com​​.


Fossil Hunter


    July sun makes the windless
air tremble          no birds
and the grass still
as if rooted in the floor
of an invisible lake

    I walk rubbled hills
where hammered-open rocks
reveal
    imprinted ferns
    trilobites
    shell traces

sweat creeps across my ribs:
    body
remembering sea





Storm Over the Flatirons


Rain veils trailed
by slate gray clouds
brush the shadowed peaks

as if some forgotten
grief in the body brawled
out into the shaken air

thick drops strike
the massive granite
outcrops now

cold white
flashes
in the dark billows

send ripples of thunder
slithering
under

the climber’s skin


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