​California Coastal Dwellers have made an art form from the rising of the full moon. They say it started when, as one harvest moon rose, a hard-of-hearing farmer sat under his arbor with its grapes about to burst. His friends hauled in their music, started a blaze from scrap wood, staked out some turf, strummed like monkeys on steel wires or picked out melodies with tortoise-shell shards. Others blew into mouth organs or through hollowed-out branches. One beat on wood blocks with sticks and another fiddled on catgut strings.
 
Some opened their throats like bawling songbirds and swished around the rim drunk on motion, while others urged their hands onto the stretched skins of dead cattle. Dogs on the periphery howled in four-part harmony.
 
All leapt internally because leaping was the reason for breathing, All were trapped
since being trapped was a prerequisite to this rhythmic bliss. Those in the center wept, knowing that never might they hear such ingenious, elusive music—until the next full birthing of the moon.
 
No one asked where the song came from, knowing only the moon-burst sky would keep playing them too flawlessly for anyone to decode any stray notes. Except the shocked farmer who, after warm rivers of wax ran out of both his ears, heard every complex note begin with a low dissonance, instantly becoming as full and perfectly ripe as the grapes directly above his head.
                                                                    

I
after I tore off my roof on purpose
i built a stairway from the liberated rafters
milled out of the last giant cedars from the everglades

now they are treads
walked on tenderly until that distant day
they will be cremated to make electricity

small puffs of their windblown remains
will be inhaled by other generations
whose own liberated atoms will nourish the ground
perhaps enlivening future trees

II
in japan doctors prescribe forest bathing
to build bonds with the trunks and limbs
leaves and canopy in fair trade for undying wellness--
which the soul will keep enfolded well after time ends

color therapists join the fun
unravelling custom stress-relief shades
be they lime-khaki-jade-clover-kelly-olive-
emerald-mint-shamrock-fern-moss or sage
enough choices to make a self-contained green rainbow

III
before your judgy mind can stop you
become a planetary citizen
admit that you’ve fallen in fondness with a sabal palm

confess that you’ve hugged that ageless oak
into which your younger self carved a heart

divulge that you cried when your prized cypress fell over
in that storm punctuated by thunder and dizzying wind

​knowing these moments eternally burn in your inner campfire
you—like trees—can translate sunlight into cool shade
rain attraction climate composure
and beyond even to your own forever-enriched behavior
in which these gifts shall live on
in human in earthly and especially in star-field
consciousness

This poem first appeared in Poetry in the Park: Nature of Place, an Anthology, 2024

​from decades of looking into
this magnificent creation
i have come to see the ocean
as something of a big brother
who pushes me
into more joy than is mortally fair
which makes me wonder
what he sees
when he looks into me?
​

​we have really done it now
last month we shot a dart into a cute little moon
peacefully orbiting its mommy asteroid
seven million miles away
knocking it silly
 
imagine just having a pleasant star-time day
then getting knifed by a sharp blade
traveling at fourteen thousand miles an hour
all because the science girls and boys tell us 
this bow and arrow might save us someday
 
they claim to have looked back sixty-six million years 
when our lush rock got jolted 
by a six-mile-wide angry piece of broken star
[ncoming at forty-five thousand miles an hour
releasing the force of a billion hiroshimas 
 
a fiery rooster-tail plume of earth rock 
shot halfway to the moon
local temperatures hemorrhaged 
many times hotter than the sun’s surface
fire-storming the mammal-packed forests 
 
oceans tsunamied over the land
followed by a deep sunless freeze 
below methane and carbon-soaked skies
spiked with sulfuric acid rain 
leaving a few microbe clusters to struggle
   
we beat the odds 
evolving out of the spoiled dinosaur-rich soup
and poisoned soil
to become the new royalty on the rock
 
maybe the creator was so freaked 
by what had been wrought
we were granted a brain capable of deflecting 
the next random asteroid
 
maybe the science kids are onto something
or just maybe some more refined organism
will spring forth after our self-created collision 
with reality

​hair an unborn rain color
lips a flower-breath festival
eyes a double sunset
 
fingers in winter sift firewood ash
to rescue spent nails from common burial
 
feet in spring re-search back alleys
where hands scavenge
rusted bolts broken blades small tangles of wire
 
a whole-body finale
upon the strike of midsummer's noon
charges its garden
armed with a double-handled digger
 
twelve holes later under stinging shower
she circles and begins a wait
for the new of the next moon
 
at that exact moment by lantern light
she feeds in her yearly steel-crumb collection
backfills each hole with drooling soil then
celebrates with raisins
and juicy pitted prunes
 
she nourishes the earth she must
because some men
have bled its metal out
 
she nurses the earth she must
because she must
 
so she reaches a fist out to the night
pulling in a positive charge then
 
amused by its sudden gravity in her chest
tunnels through her unlit house
all the way to the mirror
to laugh at the image
of a servant who drops to her knees
on warm mornings
and fingers the globe like a rosary bead


​First published in January 2022 in Tiny Seed Literary Journal