sparasso

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red-black ripened haws slung over thorns pass me by unpicked all winter

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winter rains combine heavy hooves, pennyroyal, slick clay, and spent hay. This misty alchemy makes slick-sucking horse-churned hillsides.

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winter rains, hard clay slick-sucking horse-churned hillsides misty alchemy

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green fern springs from brown — “all these deaths contain the seeds of resurrection.”

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acorn cache gathered carefully with food in mind But wait — a weevil

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to make an acorn hunter stop fast in their tracks: a cache full of frass

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white mushroom spread wide two days — beheaded, deer-yanked from humus and leaves

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stumbling down a path dampened by pre-dawn dark, my passage smoothed by dribbling rain — fallen clumps of lichen my only beacons.

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silence broken by people who cannot whisper is loudest to me

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white passes mouth to mouth in a gobbling mass of turkeys: a paper towel.

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my reddest depths lie in a pool beneath an old fallen oak's rough clay root ball

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rain-swollen lichens drip heavy down their trees, which almost groan like buildings overstressed and barely held upright

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my mind wanders to the vertex of fog and hills blurring the distance

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madrone berries are snatched away by eager birds before I can plan what to make with the orange drops: wine, strands of beads, or seedlings.