It’s a hundred year climb
from the foothills
to the mine where a warning is posted
not to pass
the columbine that lean
across the entrance
where the darkness floats on water
going deep inside
to where a Hermit Thrush sings
year after melancholy year, but
so beautifully even
the bears stop to listen
when they come down from the sunlit ferns.
Comes the tapping
of the hammer, still trapped,
comes a whiskey scented
curse, and here,
at the threshold of the past,
the Streak-backed
Oriole returning
to the light, feathers a shade
of flame not even
a century could dim.
                        

Through a window dark on one side
and light on the other, an hour before the sky’s first
blush, a screech owl’s call
is half sound, half sleep, as it repeats
and bounces on a slender branch.
While the Earth moves one degree
toward dawn, the mountain is open
for its coyotes’ return, and here
comes the first of them
taking silky steps along the wash
with the moon in his teeth.
*
There’s lightning in the fallen leaves
and a lizard in the cloud
welling up behind the mountain
in a sky washed clean by rain.
A green light has come
shining ground up in the desert
and thrashers worm the urban grass
while above the golf course pond
dragonflies hang
on fine threads spun
from a million silent years.
*
An inked veil
swirls around the street lamps
pulled by the tip
of a nighthawk’s pointed wing.