nature

Hoary-headed Grebe from series, Small Deaths, by Kate Breakey, silver gelatin photograph, hand-colored with oil and pencils   * * * Hoary-headed grebes are usually silent. Their nests are a…

* * * The Hummingbird After the window had closed (it was raining so hard) I told myself just one of those things you say: I’ll begin to love again.…

* * * Peacock So much love, and it can do nothing against death! —César Vallejo It lies by the motorway’s rain-shrouded shoulder, motionless & mud-robed. Orphaned __________by the morning…

* * * Tillandsia Tillandsia; quiet birds of the forests, Perched and flocked ‘tween ebbing bark, of arboreal tenements; nests, of tropical richness where dreams embark. “What of life do…

I go out only as instructed: once per day to move homebound muscles. When I hear the Yale lock click shut behind me, I reflexively pat my pockets; there’s no…

* * * Be careful with this hurt creature that you hold: a little bird, barely breathing but gently panting, after you quieted her heartbeat in your hands The softest…

There is something about your hands, the gentle attentiveness with which they allow the beetle to crawl over them, crossing the same space over and over again as you move…

The lover speaks in bundles of sentences but does not integrate these sentences on a higher level, into a work; his is a horizontal discourse: no transcendence, no deliverance, no…

* * * 42’55” N, 70’85” W Gulls pick at empty shells, scattered. Sailboats sit on sand, anchors down. A black cardigan harbors her shoulders. wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwNew England is too cold.…

We lived in a house of owls their planetary eyes tracking my childhood years; sentinels, strangely silent, always still. One in particular, the long-eared eagle – Bubo bubo – haunted…

The first time I ever saw an owl outside a book or a screen was when I visited Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary in Rajasthan, India in November 2016. Having spent a…

Aaron and I are staring through Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Pennsylvania masterwork. The famous house’s cantilevers stack themselves over Bear Run, the stream that runs through the house and climaxes…

People were curious and wanted to see something rare—a great black hawk from Mexico with legs so long that it hunted squirrels by running them down. Bird lovers drove in…

* * * Sparrow frantic chirping a thread around his neck I’m afraid to touch him he’ll die hanging from my fence I reach out       take him in the palm…