Mist

My soul is mist over the valley,
my flesh the old-growth cedar stand.
Deep inside my chest a stillness,
a dark pool surrounded by ferns

and trillium, where thought

may not enter, nor future, nor past.
Here I thirst, and discover

a fertile desolation. I crush

a scarlet berry full of stars

on my tongue, and cannot tell you

any more about this place
except, returning is not repetition.

This may be the furrow where we lay
before we trembled, and had lips.

In Winter, after the worm

has had her way, the sap of the apple
comes here to remember its seed.
This is where the gentle feral purr
of the mother lynx begins. Here

the silver cilia-fringed and wrinkled

crone sleeps, dreaming her next body.
Follow the deer path of this breath
to the meadow where nothing
was ever wrong, your original

innocence consumed

in the stillness of a raven's echo.
What has fallen has fallen,
broken into shards of perfection,
nursing shoots of new green up
from the moldering umber of the old log.
What are we but gold cocoon stuff

gathered in the hollow of a February bulb?
To bear our fruit will take two seasons.
But we'll be wondrous honey, the blush

of one rose in each other's cheeks.


Photo: I met this nurse long in the temperate rain forest
of Mount Rainier, near the Carbon River.